Category Archives: Teaching

Bacteriophobia and the Writing Instructor

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I am not a fan of Henry Giroux, but somewhere he says teachers ought to be “intellectuals.”  I guess that’s what I am.  Once I went to an on campus talk by Richard Rorty.  Very few showed up.  bacteriaHardly anybody from philosophy, but a few people from English.  One of the English professors saw me and said, sort of dryly, “I might have known you would be here.  You’re an intellectual.”

Perhaps being an intellectual is like being a perpetual learner.  While those biology lectures I attended for my research writing class were boring, especially after hearing them five years in a row, I did enjoy learning about the biological stuff.  But maybe I was able to enjoy it because I didn’t have to memorize and regurgitate it.  I didn’t take notes.  I listened and day dreamed.

Somewhere Paul Goodman says all true learning arises from need, desire, curiosity and imagination.  Biology can excite the imagination.  I noticed for example that some of the viruses looked a good deal like the lunar landing module.  They had amazing shapes. And my colleagues got a bit sick of me because I would spout biological stuff and went around saying that we were all going to be killed by some microbial disease, and if we had any social conscience at all, none of us would use those soaps that say they kill bacteria.

The only right way to kill bacteria is with something like alcohol.  That causes the cell wall(s) of the microbe to burst. Bam! They are dead. Alcohol is a true bactericide.  But that store bought stuff you squirt on your hands kills the bacteria, not by blowing them up, by screwing with its DNA.  You just don’t want to screw with a bacterium’s DNA because those critters are very, very adaptable.  You end up killing off 99% of them but the 1% that remains may have a resistance to the bacteria killer and those suckers will only grow stronger.  Bacteria actually swap DNA.  I mean they are swimming along and for some reason one bacterium just swaps DNA with a bacteria like itself.  It’s like, “Hi how are you.  Let’s swap!” That’s how they adapt.  Constant swapping.

 So I told my colleagues every time you use that drug store bacteria killer you are acting out of your own selfish interests (your desire to not get a cold or flu) and not thinking of the future of the human race.  And on top of that when you use the drug store stuff, you may kill a number of them, but most you don’t because bacteria aren’t stupid.  They flee!  And the bacteria that are on your hands end up on the face of the person sitting across from you.

Also we have several hundred different kinds of bacteria and microbial creatures living right inside of us.  Each human being is a complex ecological system.  Many of these bacteria serve vital purposes, vital to us I mean.  They are essential to the digestion of some vitamins and minerals.  We can’t live without them.  Over millions of years mammals have developed symbiotic relations with a whole host of bacterium.

I had a friend for example who had a really bad ear infection but had to fly somewhere.  So the doctor gave her some powerful stuff to kill the infection so she could fly.  But the anti-biotic ended up killing off all of one type of bacteria.  My friend had horrible headaches and even flashes of temporary blindness.  The bacteria the antibiotic had killed off fed on another and without it there, the other bacteria had gone ape-shit crazy, and my friend was suffering from the “feces” or byproducts of the crazy bacteria.  So they tried to restore the ecological balance by having my friend eat noting but PROTEIN for six months, since the bacteria that had gone ape-shit crazy was dependent upon starches (sugars) for its survival.

Maybe it’s just me.  But this sort of thing excites my imagination.

Outlines Online

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

The ethic’s teacher who liked to mix it up with his students used overheads too.  He was pretty contentious, and the second year I attended his class, he announced he would be putting the overheads online.  I want you to listen, he said, to what I am saying and not writing down what’s on greymassthe overhead.  Also, he was a quick talker, and I think he was tired of having to stand there and wait while the students copied what he had just been saying before he could move to a new overhead (he didn’t have two overhead projectors like the biology guys did).

He went a step further and had one of the teaching assistants take notes for the class.  These were then taken to the note taking service where students could buy the notes if they wanted.  These notes—I bought some of them—were interesting because they could serve as examples of how notes should be taken and perhaps because the note taker was himself a philosophy major a tiny bit of interpretation of the lectures crept into the notes.

So the students had three sources to use to memorize and regurgitate: the lectures, the online outlines, and the note taking service.  Actually they had four sources since the course also had a reader featuring selections from Kant, Benthan, Mill, and up to date articles on abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. But they didn’t do any of the reading.

One immediate result of the teacher’s conscientiousness was a drop in attendance. Students came to the lecture to copy the outlines, but they didn’t need to do that anymore since the outlines were online.  To the teacher’s credit and a testimony to the sturdiness of his ego, this drop didn’t bother him. Possibly, he felt that the students who came to lecture were really interested.

I did wonder what those biology teachers felt.  The first day of that class every one of the 800 seats would have a body in it and the aisles too would be full.  But by the end of the second week, a drop off had already distinctly occurred, and towards the end of the quarter, attendance had dropped to about a third of its original total.  At one point, possibly in my second year of attending the course, they must have just given up on attendance because they started videotaping the lectures, and if you were biology major you could go online and view the lectures.  The technology was relatively new so all you could see was this little, tiny stick figure in the middle of space in the middle of the screen, but the sound was good.

Another result, though, of the teacher’s contentiousness was not as immediate but more troubling in its way.  The TA’s for the course read the first paper and the midterm and said, perhaps because the teacher had so effectively communicated his outlines, that all the papers were alike.  One after the other.  True, a very few papers that were exceptionally well written registered as A’s; and true a few were very poorly written (usually by students whose first language was not English) and stood out as C’s.  But in between, they could find nothing but a grey and indistinguishable mass.

So when students came to question their grades, the TA’s didn’t know what to do sometimes because, upon rereading the paper or parts of it, they really couldn’t remember why they had given that section four points rather than five.  One TA just threw in the towel and gave every student a B+ on the second paper.  This took the students a while to figure out but when they did they were pretty annoyed.

I guess the lessons derived from the online outline experiment became known.  The last time I sat through the course, the teacher had moved to laptop and data projector.  She didn’t however put the outlines on the web.  Indeed, on more than one occasion, she stopped the class and told a student to put away his or her camera because students were not to take pictures of her outlines and distribute them on the web.  Now with the cell phone camera I doubt she would be able to stop outline pirating.

Bic 4 Click

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

The pain though—as I said—is probably mostly mine.  An occasional student, with some sort of authority issue, might be hurt at the idea that the university professor could give a hoot about the bic4clickstudents’ view of nearly anything.  In any case, if they are hurt, the pain doesn’t last too long; they buckle under and get busy mastering their regurgitation skills.

I attended part one of the introduction to biology sequence for four or five years.  This was a few years before the laptop and the data projector came along  The lecture was held in a hall that could seat 800 and was used for dance troupes and public speakers.  The biology professors had a double barrel shot gun two overheard projector approach.  The professor would talk though his overhead projected on the back of the huge stage, and when he was done with that overhead, he would walk clear acrross the stage and put it on another data projector, so the students who hadn’t been able to keep up with his speaking of the first overhead, could continue to copy from the first overhead as he launched into the next one.

This course started at 8 in the morning and was ungodly boring.  The lights were usually dimmed, and I think that was the first time I observed a student reading the campus newspaper in the dark. I sat there consternated.  Why, the hell was this student sitting there in the dark trying to read the newspaper.  (A) why was he sitting there and NOT taking notes because (B) I could see no other possible reason for being there.  And (C) instead of taking notes (C) why was he reading the student newspaper with (D) inadequate light when (E) right outside one could find plenty of light if (F) one wished to read the newspaper.

This student’s strange behavior made less sense than that of the student, a couple of rows, back who, his head flung back, was sawing wood.  Sleeping in the dark made sense though certainly sleeping in one of those seats didn’t.

One morning sitting in this class I became aware of clicking sounds.  Many, many clicking sounds.  I thought, oh my god, perhaps the clicking sounds are the beginning of some sort of student rebellion.  Perhaps a form of passive resistance or protest against the miserable lectures.  The faster the professor talked the more the clicking went on.  I wondered if the professor could hear the clicking and interpreted it as a sign of rebellion.

Boy was I stupid.  Because when I asked biology students in my research paper class about the clicking, one of them took out a pen, and clicked it.  Red ink, he said.  He clicked it again.  Blue ink.  And another click produced yellow ink.  And final click: black ink. So somebody had made a pen for hyper diligent students that allowed them to use one pen to take their notes in three different ink colors.  No they had not been rebelling; they were honing their memorize and repeat skills.

What Do YOU Think?

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I didn’t want to tell those students in that class linked with ethics that their job was to memorize and repeat the professor’s lectures.  The pain though was probably more mine than theirs—the ideaunclesam that writing should be reduced to that, to the “regurgitation,” of the lectures, to nothing more or less than a form of test irritates me no end.

Still, one student said, you mean they don’t want to know what we think.

What was I to say, “Of course not, you addled child.  What planet have you been living on?”  But I didn’t say that:

“Well, some do I am sure.  But you have to be able to speak their language and if you can’t do that yours thoughts make little or no sense to the Professor.”

“But,” the addled child persists, “it says right here in the question (for the midterm) that in the last part they want to know what we think about (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc).”

“Alright then what do you think?”

This always tends to stump the addled child because he or she has not stopped to think that he or she may not have any thoughts on the subject…

“Well, I think,” says the addled child who then goes on to repeat in a more or less mangled form something the professor said in class as an objection to (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc)

I say, “Well, then, so you agree with the professor when he said “X” because you are saying the same thing (X) he said.  That’s clear.  But what do you think?  Can you think of anything else?  If not, I would strongly recommend that you memorize and repeat as your thoughts what the professor says.

Listen.  It’s not that I don’t think something is horrendously wrong with utilitarianism.  I mean what the hell is a “hedon” and how the hell do you measure it.  As far as I know nobody has developed a “hedonic” measurement devise.  But honestly, I have no objections, coherent ones, to utilitarianism that others have not had or that have not been brought up in class. I mean, what have you got.  I didn’t make this system up.  I don’t like it either.  But the deck is stacked against beginning students especially when it comes to saying what you think.  Maybe it’s better to know that memorization and repetition is required.  Knowing that might save you time beating up the wrong bush.  Wait, I mean, barking up the wrong tree.  I am just trying to be straight and not beat around the bush.” 

And just as I am getting warmed up, somebody says, “What IS a hedon?”

Self as Fascia

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

According to JP Sartre, there is no such thing as an isolated individual.  Robinson Crusoe was not isolated; he brought the values, customs and mores of his particular society with him to his lonely island.

fasciaThe “individual” is best pictured as a nexus or node for a highly complex and frequently contradictory relationships with people, institutions, ideals, values, mores and particular objects (such as a car or watch). 

The self is best pictured as the fascia or connective tissues that hold the diverse, highly complex and contradictory relationships in a relatively stable configuration.

The relationship of the self or fascia to the relationships that it holds in place is dialectical.  The fascia of the hand holds the bones of the hand in place and makes possible the function of the hand as a hand.  The fascia of the foot, while making it possible for the foot to function as a foot, will not help the hand function as a hand.

The fascia of the self, however, is not fixed.  Rather its shape and design varies with the function and functioning of the diverse and contradictory relationships of the “individual” to its “objects” (ideals, values, morals, ambitions, skills, and particular material objects).

If the fascia of the self becomes rigid and/or calcified, any changes in the complex and contradictory relationships that it seeks to stabilize and hold in place will be experienced as painful.

 If the fascia of the self becomes rigid or calcified it will not be able to develop in relation either to its internal impulses or relative to changes in the social sphere.

That the fascia of the self is capable of change or more properly of development makes the self susceptible to fragmentation or breaking up as previously concealed, for example, contractions between relations come to the fore. The fact that the fascia will fragment and break up on occasion does not mean however that, as some have concluded, that there is no self.

The capacity of the fascia (self) to withstand contradiction and the pains of development is dependent upon the biochemical makeup of the fascia.  This make up and these elements remain and are continuous throughout the lifespan of the fascia.  While then the fascia may break up or become rigid or change relative to development, the essential elements of the fascia do not break up or change.  That iron may be liquid or rigid or appear in a variety of shapes does not mean that it is not iron.

Change does not mean development.  A hand, for example, may be hit by hammer; this blow may permanently cripple the hand.  The fascia of the self may calcify in a form of scar tissue.  But just a blind person may correct to a degree for his or her blindness by the development of the other senses, so the fascia of the hand may correct or adjust to permit the hand a different form or kind of functionality.

Development Basic Propositions

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Perhaps to clarify my thinking about education as self-development, I should state—although I find lists tedious—several propositions concerning the developmental process.

babycrawlingProposition 1. All developmental steps must be phase appropriate.  When it is a phase appropriate for a child to crawl she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to walk she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to talk, she will.

Proposition 2. Developmental phases build upon and incorporate skills and goal setting established in previous phases.  A later phase does not wipe out or obliterate an earlier phase; rather had the earlier phase not occurred the later phase would not occur either or if it does so occur, it occurs as a compensatory structure. 

Proposition 3. One phase is not “superior” to another.  An adult is not superior to an infant.  An adolescent is not superior to an adult.  If as Wordsworth said, the child is father to the man, which is “superior.”

Proposition 4. The movement into and out of a phase is necessarily attended by momentary disequilibrium or de-stabilization.  One needs only to remember puberty to understand the kinds of destabilization attendant upon development.  One used to speak of “growing pains.

 Proposition 5. The frustrations attendant upon destabiliation must be optimal.  If the frustrations prove either traumatic or chronic, the challenges of the developmental move may not be met.  That particular impulse towards development will remain undeveloped in an unconscious and archaic form.

Proposition 6.  If frustrations prove traumatic or chronic, the individual may be forced off the developmental path.  His or her psychological energies go into erecting defenses against possible self-fragmentation and de-stabilization.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott has said, there may exist in our society a gap greater than that between the social classes and that is the gap between those capable of continuing development and those who are not.

Proposition 7.  The possiblities of development are most likely to be realized if they occur with an overall “empathic milieu.”  This fancy phrase is intended to suggest that development is most likely to occur if the trials and tribulations of the person undergoing destabilization are recognized, affirmed as necessary, and understood.

Proposition 8.  Currently, institutions of higher education, while they serve to destabilize the individual, do not recognize the potentials for development implicit in higher education and do not afford students an “empathic milieu.”

I think I could write more propositions.  But these afford a rough outline and eight is a round number.
 

You can lead a person to college but you can’t make him think.

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Buying my theory that students might want to learn something requires buying a number of propositions that people appear disinclined to buy these days.  One of these propositions might be developmentthat people want or desire to develop.  I think it generally accepted that infants and children go through a pretty regular developmental sequence; and that one step in a sequence builds upon and around the one that came before.  But these developments one might say, along with the developments of puberty are biologically driven.  About 21—once the adolescent mind had gone through its hormonal changes—development stops.  Adulthood appears, de facto, the end of development.

But not all developments are purely biologically driven; the opportunities for such development are dictated by the social sphere.  Adolescence, as an emotional and moral state, has been significantly prolonged in the industrialized western world.  People are living much longer and that in turn changes one’s perspective (or development view) of life’s stages.

I think that higher education—along with other “real life” situations—poses the possibility of a developmental at the level of cognition or, since I dislike that world, intellect.  The mind, as LeRoi Jones put it, is a muscle.  It can be worked out and further developed.  This is the promise of higher education.  But it remains largely a promise.

 Students at Duke a while back sported a t-shirt that said, “You can lead a student to college but you can’t make him think.”  One might be inclined to infer from this that students don’t want to think.  But that’s not what the t-shirt says; what it says is true: you can’t make anybody think.  Thinking requires that the individual take a step, make a leap, however dimly and unconsciously that step or leap might be felt.

Taking that step or even dimly wanting to take it can be psychological disturbing and unsettling.  A lot goes into taking that step.  In the current system of higher education this is what remains unstudied, and unrecognized.  It takes a lot to develop the intellect, and institutions do absolutely nothing to support students in taking the step.  They can hardly even begin to do so if they fail to acknowledge that taking the step can be unsettling and disturbing.

The institutions of higher education do their part, as I have indicated, to disturb and unsettle students by beating them upside the head with the misery, injustice, and ugliness of this world.  No doubt the human race is pissing and shitting itself.  The full recognition of this fact, however, is bound to be devastating, more indeed that any individual could truly bear.  And with no support in trying to face it, with professors talking about the most horrendous things in detached and surgical tones, students repress and eventually numb themselves to the drums of despair, decay, and final destruction.

No wonder, as I have said, students become pre-mature cynics most especially about the realm of the intellect.  Why think about these things?  They are far too unsettling.  Denial is a much better route, along with concluding that most of what the university teaches is bullshit.

Dogs Can Read! And, thus, have the right to do so.

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

During one of those ethics classes, I sat through one of the strangest “discussions” I have ever heard.  The course was taught for a couple of years by a good guy who liked to mix it up a bit with the students and was pretty quick on his feet.  I don’t remember the overall context of the dogreadingdiscussion, but at one point he said, in effect, a person cannot be said to have or be given a right if the person cannot exercise that right.  For example, it makes no sense to say a person has the right to jump over a building if he or she cannot jump over a building, or to say that a dog has a right to read when I dog is not capable of reading.

A bit later, as the class came towards it close, the instructor entertained questions and it became clear through a little give and take that some number of students did not agree with the assertion that a dog does not have the right to read even though it cannot read.  The instructor cleverly turned his questioning this way and that to get at the core of the students’ objection to the assertion.  But the core was not forthcoming.  I was caught up in the mystery and, having raised my hand said, perhaps people are thinking that, while a person does not the right to drink till he or she is 21, clearly he or she can drink and therefore ought to have the right.

My attempt at opening Aladdin’s lamp however seemed to fall on deaf ears.  I had thrown my bread on the water but nobody rose to the bait.  The instructor plodded on until finally, he uttered one of the strangest sentences I have heard uttered in an academic setting, “We all do agree, don’t we, that dogs cannot read!”

“Well,” they do look at the TV set, one student dumbly replied.  Yea, intoned another, “How do we know dogs can’t read.”  I am convinced that people can get trapped in a web of words, of false distinctions and empty jargon, of such power that they are sometimes led by the “logic” of that “discourse” to say and to believe the most amazingly absurd things.  We all tend towards the solipsistic; only ongoing vigilance, effort, and the exercise of imagination keeps us from succumbing to it completely.

But this was something different.  This approached something like a willfully and defiantly maintained delusion.  I chewed on this case for some considerable time off and on over the years after.  Eventually I came to understand the event more psychologically.  The students clearly identified with dogs.  Were they saying, as if from the depths of their unconscious, we are, in this class, like dogs.  We cannot read either; we cannot make out any meaning in what we have been asked to read.  We cannot understand a word of this, but, even if we are dogs, we have a right to understand, a right to grasp it, and that right should not be taken away from us even if we lack the capacity to do it.  And who knows, you may not see it or grant it, but how do you know that I, like the dog, do not understand in my own way.

This was before the time “dawg” replaced “dude” as a casual appellation.  That it—that one’s buddy is now a “dawg”—is worthy of some thought.  But I infer from the above that students feel not infrequently like dogs in the halls of learning.  I infer also that many students want to understand; but the method by which learning is delivered has so beaten them down that they can only sit in front of the TV quite wordlessly.

Saving Keith Richards: Or: An Argument for Abortion

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Apparently, Judith Jarvis Thompson argument for abortion was de rigueur.  It popped up each time I sat through the ethics course in all its bizarre and gothic detail.  This damn long and detailed keithrichardsthought experiment to my recollection involved a person, of a certain blood type, being kidnapped by a group of music lovers.  As you may note a thought experiment need not have any relation to any known reality; I can personally think of no group of people less likely to kidnap anybody than a group of music lovers.

But let us say these music lovers have fallen under the spell of a fanatic music lover, and high on crack, kidnap this person, whose blood type they have in some mysterious fashion previously learned. The person apparently makes no attempt to resist the weenie music lovers and is taken and strapped down to a bed where the person is connected up by tubes to a famous musician who will die unless he or she receives a constant infusion of blood from this very particular person. 

Why the famous musician is not in a hospital, as usually would be the case, is not explained.  Nor is it explained how a group of music lovers would know how to hook a person up with tubes.  Apparently, one of them had at one time been pre-med.  Nor is it explained what makes the fanatics think they have the right to kidnap somebody even for the purpose of preserving the famous musician’s life.  Finally, no one apparently has bothered to ask the famous musician if he or she approves of this particular method of saving his or her life.

If one may plow through all the absurdities and improbabilities of the set up for the thought experiment one gets to the crux.  The kidnapped person wakes up.  The situation is explained to him or her, and he or she is told that if he or she stays hooked up to the musician for nine months that the musician will live, miraculously, and be able to resume a normal life unattached to anybody.  According to Thompson all rational persons would agree that the kidnapped person has a right to unattach him or herself from the musician without bringing down upon his or her self any moral onus whatsoever.

As the reader has no doubt guessed, the thought experiment is intended as an analogy to a forced pregnancy, the result of rape, and we are to conclude that just as it would be OK to detach one’s self from the musician so it would be OK for a woman to detach herself from an unwanted fetus. Additionally those who would oppose such a decision must be a group of totally insane musical fanatics, senile fans perhaps of Keith Richards. And this is not the end of the experiment either.  It goes on and on to cover other instances of unwanted pregnancy, including a bad condom that allows buds of some kind to leak into a house and become rooted in a rug. 

 My students couldn’t make heads or tales, though, of this experiment.  They seemed unable or perhaps unwilling even to memorize the basic set up for the experiment. They just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And the whole thing did seem insane: to find ourselves talking about fanatical musicians as we supposedly investigated the right of a woman to control her own body. 

 I found the whole thing and the considerable time devoted to it infuriating because I think the experiment trivializes the pain and suffering involved in a forced pregnancy and the decision to terminate it.  Further, it all seemed ass-backwards.  Whether or not a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy is not an ethical question, but a political one.  Rather than being asked to think about fanatical musicians, I think it would have been better for students to examine the political and economic reality of women still being very much the “second sex.”  But this would not be doing ethics, since as we can see actually matters of fact have nothing to do with ethics.

Dry as Dust Analytic Philosophy

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I am not an academic philosopher so I could be mistaken, but I think, for every one of those six years, that, while the “Introduction to Ethics” course was taught by different people, that all taught spiderwebethics under the heading of “analytic philosophy.”  Perhaps as a consequence of this dry as dust approach, my students, almost to a person over the six years, reported, when the class was done, that they would never again be caught dead taking an ethics course or anything else in the philosophy department.

Richard Rorty has written about the plague of analytic philosophy and pretty much described it as serving best—given its hair splitting and logic chopping—as preparation to be a lawyer.  And Bernard Williams, a relatively famous ethicist, argues that moral philosophy, while generally boring. today has become particularly boring.  If this is the case, then I do think the teaching of ethics should be removed utterly from the hands of academic philosophers.  

This might at least be a step in the right direction.  How it should be taught, I don’t know.  But I know it shouldn’t be taught in such a way as to turn students away utterly from the study of philosophy.  For my part, I found the course only mildly boring, even a bit soothing in its boringness.  But I have studied philosophy and through my education have come to learn to think in ways that allowed me to appreciate at least mildly the pure amount of brain power and the considerable cleverness that had gone into the construction of endless and absurd arguments.

The students however were perplexed and frustrated.  First, it’s this argument they said, and then it’s that argument that says the first argument is wrong, and then the second argument itself is said to be wrong.  What, they wanted to know, was the point, if all of it was wrong. Knowing that all of ethics up to that point had been a mistake might be liberating for that rare and aberrant student who could then think, hell, if it’s all wrong, maybe I will be the one to get it right.  But the average student certainly was not encouraged to think in this way with the result that they felt they were stuck memorizing and repeating stuff either completely wrong or significantly flawed.

They didn’t see as I did that for the academic philosophy whether an argument is right or wrong is not the point; it’s an argument and as such material for making another one perhaps later in one’s career for a professional journal.  I tried to explain to my students that their philosophy teachers were in love with what they taught (however aberrant that love might be); that they ate, drank, breathed, and shat that stuff; that what they were trying to do in their own bizarre way was to make students love it too.  Consider the lectures, I said, rather clumsy foreplay.

But my students were unimpressed and I guess there was no reason they should be.  After all they were freshmen with some sort of naïve idea that ethics was about the study of right and wrong and not young academics in training, young academics already completely caught up in a vast web of arguments and counter arguments about which those beginning students knew absolutely nothing.  My students didn’t even know that they were being taught ethics from the perspective of analytic philosophy; and the teaching assistants did nothing to enlighten students on this critical point, as if analytic philosophy was the only way to do philosophy.