Category Archives: Teaching

Teacher of Record

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As teacher of record, I am obliged to ok my teaching assistants’ final grades.  That’s done online now.  So there I was wide awake at 11:45 pm and pissed off because one of my charges hadn’t turned in his grades. The deadline for that was midnight, so there I was, like an idiot, online and johnny on the spot should he get them in at the last second.  I didn’t stay up till 12 though because I couldn’t access the site to approve the grades anyway, most of the school having apparently decided to turn in grades at the last possible second.

 

This morning I learn there was a screw up on the site; also the original date had been set for today, not yesterday, and they moved it back to yesterday for some unknown reason and my TA hadn’t gotten the word and that’s why his grades were late.

So what with all the screw ups and the site crashing, they extended the deadline for grades until 3 today.  So I stayed up late for no damn good reason at all.  I knew it was for no damn good reason at the time, but I couldn’t help myself.  Finally, I am at long last done officially with last quarter with four days till the next one starts.

 

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Sometimes I forget we live less than a mile from the Pacific, but today I remembered.  So here are a couple of shots from Campus Point.

Ramona Drive

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We’d heard you could find oranges just lying around on the streets for the picking up in California.  ramonadrThe Land of Milk and Honey at the end of our Exodus.  But we didn’t find any free oranges, and the place turned out to be pretty dirty really.  Moving from SC to CA was a big change.  We gained things economically and lost our connection to the culture we had been raised up in.

This is Dave, in the cowbow hat, and me, and Steve with that big metal pole. We are standing out back of the house on Ramona Dr, though the house wasn’t probably built yet, but in its first stages.  As you can see we had much managed to move into the middle of nowhere again; this time East County San Diego which wasn’t all that built up in 1956.

We had about ¾’s of an acre that went back to about that pile of wood you can see behind us, and then on down the gulley and up the hill on the other side you can see to the right a darker patch.  That’s the truck farm that grew tomatoes and peppers.  On beyond that stretch pretty barren hills right on up to Mount Helix—that you can’t see in this picture.

Directly behind us you can see the ’47 Studebaker that carried us and towed all our earthly belongings in a U-Haul trailer from one end of the USA to the other.  That car gave us its life for us because by the time we got to CA the rear axel had broken, and the car sat out back for a number of years, as is the Southern tradition.

The dirt immediately beneath our feet looks pretty white and was called locally leche, which is Spanish for milk.  All white and crumbly, it wasn’t real dirt at all.  You couldn’t grow anything in it.  As far as I was able to learn, it was dried up sea shells and such left from a time long ago when the whole area had been under the ocean.

More Treacle

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The problem with Pinker—as a representative of the evolutionary psychology movement antiessentialistgenerally—is that there’s something to what he says.  The mind is not a tabula rasa.  That’s as Pinker says, though the British philosopher, Peter Blackburn holds Pinker’s feet to the fire a bit on that one.  He says Locke, for example, did not believe in the kind of utter tabula rasa that Pinker claims he did; instead, according to Blackburn, Locke was  “…perfectly happy with the idea that the nature of the slate or paper may determine what can be written on it.”

I can buy that, but over the last couple of decades, I have felt in my reading around and in my listening to others that in some of the disciplines at least, especially and sadly in the humanities, people have decided that the mind is a “piece of paper” or somewhat more complicatedly now “a computer screen” and the only thing written on either are words.  Language became “fetishized,” it seemed to me, in ways I could not comprehend.  

What is this talk I wondered?  Do these people, though I may interpret them incorrectly, actually believe that, if one can change the way people think about the world, one can change the world.  Too many of my students at one time seemed to me overly familiar with the idea of stereotyping.  Oh, that’s stereotyping they would say or perhaps the more popular word at the graduate level was “essentializing.”  I understood a possible positive motive behind the anti-stereotyping and anti-essentializing movement that made it a bit impolitic to say the whole movement was bogus.

That motive also confused me.  I certainly don’t believe in going around essentializing people or races. Or, in other words, I don’t believe in going around calling people or races bad names or making assumptions about people and races on the basis of their names.  The whole business in my head got screwed up with the political correctness thing.  That’s my problem I guess, but I may be forgiven I hope.  Things do get complicated when an epistemological claim of some sort gets all mixed up with a high falut’en moral imperative of some sort.

I found it hard to say to my anti-essentializing and anti-stereotyping students that they had things all screwed up when the trend seemed to be in part an attempt to be decent people and to treat others decently.  But to get, if I can to the point, I did try to say that they might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  One can’t think at all I wanted to claim unless one stereotypes or essentializes. Language necessarily abstracts, but that was hard to convey if one is talking with people who honestly believe that there is Nothing But Language and thus no other Reality from which it might be said to “Abstract.”

So a person was pretty much stuck if he or she, as I wanted to do, wanted to argue against the anti-essentialist movement since to do so would automatically put one in the camp of those who believe in a “reality” beyond the language that shapes it.  I suppose I could have said something like “The painful feeling of gas in my stomach is not the same thing as saying ‘I have gas.’”  But I don’t think my having gas would serve all that much to sway anybody’s thinking. So with mixed feelings, though some of relief, I began to read people like Pinkus as saying to the language fetishists:  Look you delusional morons.  You seem to think you can change people just by changing the way you think about them, when in fact what you can think (or say) about people is circumscribed, hemmed in and dictated, by the very tabula rasa that allows you to think at all.

But I put myself poorly.

Nightmare

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I do understand the emotions that might have driven writing teachers to want to lay claim to content.  The professors in the English Department, who rarely if ever taught composition, were nonetheless the bosses of those of us who did.  Before the writing program moved off, at least bureaucratically, on its own, my classes were visited, for the purposes of review and rehiring, for a number of years by English professors.

nightmareI remember having been visited by a Renaissance Scholar who made me pretty nervous.  He wasn’t a bad guy but I was pretty sure he was an elitist. He thought poetry was the highest form of literature and, how to say, the highest of all forms of experience.  I was, that quarter, teaching the second course in the sequence, the one that featured, in the closing weeks of the quarter, a novel.  I did Crime and Punishment for old times sake and as a tribute to my misspent youth (misspent reading Russian novels when I should have been out getting more well rounded).  I broke the students into groups to consider directed questions.  They kicked in and I felt the class had gone pretty well.

The professor, as he left, paused for a moment.  He was smiling so I figured I had done OK.  I guess I had, but he didn’t say anything about the class and the students or the quality of discussion.  Instead he expressed mild surprise at my not having called students’ attention in a particular passage to an allusion Dostoevsky had made to Pushkin.  Oh yea Eugene Onegan, I said since I figured he was really trying to see if I had caught the reference.  I had but I didn’t let on that I had never read the damn thing and had no intention of doing so.

And that was it, really, for comment or response to the class.  I had trouble not feeling his lack of response was a cover for a negative one.  But now I don’t think that was it.  I valued the way I had conducted the class, the way I had managed and elicited discussion, and he valued Crime and Punishment and my expert knowledge of it which I did have since I have always been an excellent reader.  He simply saw a different class than the one I thought I was teaching.

I wasn’t trying to impart to students some esoteric knowledge about Crime and Punishment or to use it as a way to teach students about symbolism or the early forms of the naturalistic novel or about C and P as a sociological treatise on the alienating effects of the movement of persons from rural to urban environments.  I didn’t want C and P to be about anything, but more a thing between myself and the students to be kicked this way and that and as offering a communicative scaffolding between the students and myself.  So that as we looked into the book and wrote about it we might also look a bit into each other.

I rather doubt the English Professor would have appreciated the quiz I liked to give on C and P.  We are going to have a quiz today, I would tell the students, and they would look downright shocked since I never quizzed them on anything.  Take out a pencil and a piece of paper, I would say, and then, Oh, forget it, we can do this orally:

Question 1:  what is the sex of Raskolnikov’s mother?

Question 2:  what is the sex of Raskolnikov’s sister?

Question 3: what is the sex of Sonya the prostitute?

Question 4:  what is the sex of the old lady that Raskolnikov kills with an ax?

Question 5:  what is the sex of the mare in the horrible nightmare of the horse beating?

Question 6: what is Raskolnikov’s sex?

Mounting the Podium

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Or, as I was trying to say before I got distracted by the Volksburger, the writing course does not have content or a disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium, as it were.  At one time, back in the early 80’s, far, far away and many moons ago, the composition shakespearedeadsequence in which I worked did have content.  The first course was a writing course—mostly students wrote —and the second course featured the informal essay, short stories, and a novel of one’s choice, and finally, believe it or not, the last course in the sequence featured poetry, a Shakespeare play, and one by a modern.

As I said, that was many moons ago.  Back then the writing program was under the purview—curricularly and adminstratively—of the English Department.  One has to say I think that these literary texts were a kind of fixed curriculum.  The sequence wasn’t arranged around mastering different sorts of writing skills, but around making sure students got a taste of poetry, the novel, and some short stories.  One administrator, I remember, expressed some dismay when the writing program became the writing program and did away with the literature part.  Now, he said, it will be possible for a student to graduate the university without having read a single play by Shakespeare.

True enough, I guess, though not sufficient reason to teach him in a writing course.  I wasn’t sure however that the reasons my more compositionally inclined colleagues gave for not teaching him were all that good.  They seemed to be saying—and this seemed the only coherent reason they could give for not teaching Shakespeare—that the content of a writing course was most properly writing and not Shakespeare.  I think teaching Shakespeare and poetry made my compositionalist colleagues feel insecure because they felt Shakespeare was a content, or disciplinary knowledge upon which one need be expert to mount the podium and pontificate.

I didn’t understand this at all; for while, yes, I had at one time been an English Major, but I had taken only one—and it was poorly taught—class on Shakespeare in my entire college career, undergraduate and graduate, and did not feel myself an expert at all.  This didn’t bother me one whit because I did not teach Shakespeare as content.  I wasn’t concerned about saying something about his work that was inaccurate because I didn’t try to say anything about him except that which might give students the confidence to read him and then to write something upon him.  I did not, for example, talk about the “nature of tragedy.”  Heaven forbid.  Given the way I approached the teaching of Shakespeare I thought his works were just as good as many and perhaps better than some works as a stimulus and catalyst for student writing.

 I was troubled also by the other side of this equation.  For the argument against teaching Shakespeare appeared to pit one content—in this case—Shakespeare against some other “content” specific to and definitive of the writing classroom.  But as I have argued, the writing classroom has no content per se or qua content.  None.  That some in the “discipline” of writing think otherwise is quite disturbing at least from a theoretical perspective and in the light of sound reasoning.  In the “real” world of course one does what one has to do.  But this idea that the content of the writing class is writing has had and continues to have pernicious effects.  I hold this idea responsible for the many teachers, usually beginning ones and Teaching Assistants, that feel one has not done one’s duty as a writing instructor unless one has managed to reduce students to complete confusion by lecturing on and on about coming up with a “thesis statement.”

Opinionated Opinion

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More on the issue of opinion and individualism.  In their Developing Reflective Judgment, Patricia King and Karen Kitchener offer a number of interviews with students to clarify the idea of reflective judgment.  In the following two interviews, students are asked to express their opinions (italics are aspartamemine).

“The following comments were made by a high school student.

I: Can you ever know for sure that your position that Nutra­sweet is safe is correct?
R: No. I don’t know for sure because I don’t manufacture it.
I: OK. Do you think we’ll ever know for sure?
R: If somebody more or less had the guts to stand up and go and do all the research on it and find out.
I: So you think someday we’ll know?
R: Yes.
I: When people disagree about the safety of chemical addi­tives [in foods], is it the case that one opinion is right and the other is wrong?
R: Some people’s opinion is right, and they can more or less prove that they are right, and the other people that are wrong.

The following excerpt from an interview with a graduate student illustrates this reasoning style.
I: Can you ever say you know for sure that your point of view on chemical additives is correct?
R: No, I don’t think so. I think given that any theorem has to start with assumptions that are not necessarily true, then even if the internal argument in your system is completely consis­tent, it might be that the assumptions are wrong. So, just from this standpoint, we can’t always be sure. I think we can usually be reasonably certain, given the information we have now and considering our methodologies.
I: Is there anything else that contributes to not being able to be sure?
R: Yes. Aside from assumptions, it might be that the research wasn’t conducted rigorously enough. In other words, we might have flaws in our data or sample, things like that.
I: How then would you identify the "better" opinion?

R: One that takes as many factors as possible into considera­tion. I mean one that uses the higher percentage of the data that we have and perhaps that uses the methodology that has been most reliable.

I.And how do you come to a conclusion about what the evidence suggests?

R: I think you have to take a look at the different opinions and studies that are offered by different groups. Maybe some studies offered by the chemical industry, some studies by the government, some private studies, a variety of studies from a variety of different areas. You wouldn’t trust, for instance, a study funded by the tobacco industry that proved that cigarette smoking is not harmful. You wouldn’t base your point of view entirely upon that study. Things like that have to be taken into account also . . . you have to try to interpret people’s motives and that makes it a more complex soup to try to strain out.”

End of quotation.  That’s a bit of a read, but I think that two distinct attitudes towards opinion are illustrated here.  They are worth looking at in some detail.  But for the moment, I ask: “How does a student get from position A to position B?”  My answer is that the student must develop intellectually and emotionally.

Freshman Disorientation

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I found, with mixed feelings, while reading around the writing of Nevitt Sanford on education.  He writes about some of the things I tried to write about in my Self-Development and College Writing.  For example:

            Today’s college student needs preparation for a world in which he must play a variety of roles and even adopt new roles perhaps several times during his life; an impersonal world in which nonetheless he must manage to remain an individual and accept his individuality; a world with awesome potential for either utopia or disaster.

That’s from Sanford’s Where Colleges Fail page 8.  My feelings are mixed not only because he beerbongmanages here a sentence with greater clarity than any single sentence I was able to write but also because this sentence was written or at least published in 1967.

            For Sanford education is not about getting a job; it’s about preparing the student as a person and an individual for life beyond, as he puts it, vocation.  And for this life beyond vocation, education must seek to develop the personality of the student, to impart to it, and bring forth from it the qualities of flexibility, openness to experience, and responsibility. He says clearly that education, as he means it, imparts values.  Today of course in the modern megamultiversity the idea of “education” for job or career has seemingly obliterated Sanford’s and my conception of what education should be.

            A number of years back I sat on a committee given the charge of reporting on, at the institution where I work, the Freshman Year Experience.  I took the whole thing pretty seriously, though looking back I see now the report, written as part of an accreditation review, was pretty much a formality.  The accrediting body was not going to deny accreditation, no matter what the quality of its Freshman Year Experience, to an instruction with a couple of Nobel Prize winners in its faculty. In fact, the chair told us  pretty much up front that the committee was not to produce a document that might upset our Chancellor or make him think he ought to do something about the Freshman Year Experience.

            The report had a number of parts or sections to it on, for example, the Freshman Year Experience and the social life of the student, as well as health of the student, and at one point, a section was to deal with the student and his or her ethical development.  I was particularly interested in this last section, and sat there somewhat stunned to see that my colleagues, faculty and staff from student affairs and counseling across campus, begin to compile a list of the various religious institutions located near campus as resources for the ethical development of the student in his or her Freshman Year Experience.

            Even understanding as I did by then that the report was not to be taken seriously, I was troubled to realize that for my colleagues that idea that the course work itself, the curriculum and the knowledge imparted, might be part of or in some way related to students’ ethical development simply did not occur.  I waited for somebody to bring up that idea or make that connection, but nobody did.  And, understanding that the report was not to be taken seriously, I pretty much just gave up at that point and psychologically, so to speak, threw in the towel.  I wasn’t about, as a lowly lecturer and writing instructor, to lecture my learned colleagues on the true nature of education and their blindness to it.

XXXX

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I am not sure what this has to do with anything, but yesterday Roland Barthe’s Pleasures of the Text, I think it was called, came to mind.  I bought it in paperback up in Berkeley some time in the 70’s.  unknownA friend was with me, and we sat down on the spot and read through it, laughing all the way.  He was telling the truth we thought.  That people read those dull old books to be bored and to find odd things as they read along maybe just an word, turn of phrase, or unfamiliar convention.  Those were the real pleasures of the text.

For example, I remember chewing over this oddity—or at least it was an oddity when I first read it—that appeared in Dostoevsky.  He would introduce a character first by name—say Svidregailov– and follow that with “from the city of XXXX in the Province of XXXX.”  It seemed as if that he was seeking to imply with those XXXX’s that he was writing about a real person, somebody somebody might know, and so as not to give the person’s identity away he was covering up possible clues to the person’s identity with those XXXX’s.

I found this strange since the book I was reading, in this case Crime and Punishment, was clearly a work of fiction.  So why would he bother to cover up the origins of a fictional chacarater.  Then I thought that perhaps Dostoevsky put in those XXXX’s to encourage the reader to think that he was writing about REAL people and that he, Dostoevsky, the author, was trying with those XXXX’s to treat those real people with some politeness or to perhaps protect himself from charges of slander.

That made some sense because, while I am not sure if people would call Doesteovsky an author in the tradition of naturalism, that’s the sort of convention naturalists use to imply they are not making up what they are writing about.  But then I wondered if Doestoevsky really had known or at least read about in some provincial newspaper of a person who had performed actions not unlike those performed by Svidregailov.  In other words, Dostoevsky, was not using those XXXX’s to make the reader think the character was real, but to encourage the reader, as an astute reader, to see the XXXX’s as a fictional convention and thus to imply that the character had no relation to anyone living or dead, fictional or non-fictional, as they like to write at the end of movies.

I don’t know if this is what Barthes meant exactly or if anybody other than a few oddball literary types, otherwise known as English majors, would find any pleasure in thinking about such a thing.  But if one does think about such a thing the only reason for doing it, I think, would be the pleasure of doing so.  For as far as I can tell I can find no way whatsoever to resolve the questions I have raised about Dostoevsky’s use of those XXXX’s.  Somebody might say, of course, oh you are just lazy; you could do some research and find some answer to your questions.  But really I don’t think so, though thinking about such an issue might be something a lazy person would do or perhaps a somewhat less than serious person might do.

I would rather resolve the question by saying simply that the oddity of the XXXX’s is an unfathomable “ambiguity.”  But if one declares a thing ambiguous, what happens to the idea of objectivity.  What’s the point or why would it be worth the effort to be objective about an unanswerable question.  To this a person devoted to the idea of objectivity might reply, why the hell would one expend any energy, mental or otherwise, on a question so transparently trivial and of no real interest to anyone living or dead.  One has much bigger fish to fry than this sort of silliness.

Well, yes, of course, but is there not some pleasure in being silly?

 

 

A Slight Case of Total Bias

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So what’s objectivity?  I guess I don’t know anymore.  But that’s sort of what I tried to be way back in college or, let’s say, I saw that as a task intimately allied with the pursuit of Truth.  I think Freud redmenaceequated objectivity with the attitude of the surgeon relative to the person being cut open.  Given my limited experience with surgeons, I think that a bad analogy.  Or perhaps he equated objectivity with the determination to look at the truth however gross, ugly, and morally repellant it might be.

I think I once thought of it that way—objectivity as the means to pursue the ends of truth, requiring a kind of emotional willingness to look at ugliness and moral decay however repellant and with the determination too to try as hard as possible to make myself aware of the beliefs and assumptions and perspectives that might shape my perception of the truth however ugly it might be.  Or perhaps it was only some unseen or unquestioned believe or attitude that made it seem repellent.

Who knew.

I felt in any case that I had a duty to look at myself as I looked at the object to see, if I could, how my self shaped what I saw.  But I guess I had a pretty high faulting notion of the truth or something like it.  I sat through lectures by professors that were very biased and apparently the professor felt no need to point to the bias or identify it as such.  And I am not speaking of something here as super-subtle as that business of constructing disciplinary distinctions.

I sat through a political science class that was devoted to international relations and the study of revolutions. This was a GE course and intended I guess as a survey of a couple of big topics.  The international relations part was informed entirely by the realist perspective I have previously mentioned (though not announced as such).  

The revolution part was quite amazing because the professor, no matter what the revolution—Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese—made it out, one way or another, that Communism had not won.  No, the pre-existing order or the mélange of parties that arouse during the revolutionary turmoil and opposed to the communists had failed to rise to the occasion.  If Communism won that as not because they had a positive agenda or appealed to the hearts and minds of the masses but because the opposition had proven inept and admittedly at times quite corrupt.

Over and over the pattern repeated itself in the analysis of this particular Professor who was Chinese and born in Taiwan.  Perhaps this Professor lacked any introspective powers or actually believed what he said.  I don’t know.  But the context of this theory—that is, himself—in his origins and attitudes was never addressed as a possible contributing factor to the Professor’s particular take on Communism and on theories of revolution more generally.

 I was appalled but didn’t mention the Professor’s possible bias to my students because I was busy trying to keep them for ridiculing and complaining about the Professor because his spoken English was, how to say, rather foggy.  The students just didn’t like the Professor it seemed, and I remember one student perturbed because the Professor had given her an A- on her first paper because he said it was “over-organized.”  What the heck, the student wondered, did that mean; and frankly I had to say that I had never heard that particular criticism of a student’s paper before.

I suggested that she visit the Professor in his office hours and ask him what it meant.  She did and her grade was changed to a straight A.

Over organized?

Ethics and the Burning Bush

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Again with the objectivity thing.  I don’t want to kick a dead horse, but too often I am suggesting students are taught things on the basis of a theory or perspective that they are unaware of and burningbushcan’t get their heads around.  Take that ethic’s course.  Ethics was presented entirely thought the lens of analytic philosophy, but students didn’t know that because they didn’t know there was any other way to think about ethics. 

Or let’s say some students did have a different way of thinking about ethics but that way was based in religion and was the expression of morality and not really ethics at all.  In short, the ethics course defined itself, dialectically speaking, against a) matters of fact and b) religion.

For example, whoever taught the course, somewhere in the first couple of lectures Socrates’ “Euthyphro” would pop up. In this dialogue, Socrates establishes the possibility of the rational discussion of values as something distinct from morality or what the gods might have to say.  He asks, is something good because the Gods feel it is good and only because of that or do the Gods assert something is good because it is good (independent of the God’s judgment).  If the former, something is good because the God’s say it is, then what a God says is good is potentially arbitrary.  I say it’s good so it’s good, period.  But if it is good independent of the God’s judgment, then it is possible to discuss why it might be good using reason and without committing an act of impiety.

Students of rhetoric might call this a disciplinary  move by which the discipline establishes the boundaries of the discipline itself.  If one follows Socrates, one can in this ethics class discuss values rationally and without recourse to what Gods might or might not think (as handed down by tradition or religious texts, such as the Bible).  And that’s what we are going to do in this class.  So out with Morality and Religion.

Similarly but along the lines of matters of fact, a clear distinction was drawn between ethics and manners.  For surely, whether or not an innocent person should be killed for the greater good was not simply a matter of manners.  Ethics as manners was ruled out because then the study of ethics would become a study of the socialization of the individual into certain ethical views.  Also, with this distinction made, one did not have to confront Schopenhauer’s claim that morality is just advanced animal training.  So much then for good old Nihilism. Or the Irrational.

I came to read the ethics course as being less about something called ethics and more as asserting the defining disciplinary boundaries of the study of ethics as if there were something to be studied other than the disciplinary boundaries of this particular way of defining ethics.

I think most of the students did not think about the ethic’s course in this way.  Instead they brought with them feelings about ethics and morality that did not necessarily fit the study of ethics as defined by the class.  And since these other ways of thinking about ethics were not directly addressed, but pushed as it were simply to the side, the result for students was confusion, a sense of futility, and boredom.  And since these things were not directly addressed either by the students themselves or the instructor students set themselves to do what they could do: memorize and regurgitate.