Category Archives: Writing Instructor

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.

BOP

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I attended the lectures for that class on US-Soviet relations for four years perhaps and then the Berlin wall came down.  I doubt they have a class now on US-Soviet relations in political science; perhaps it’s covered in history. The collapse of the wall produced one of the more authentic teaching moments I have seen.  The professor who taught the course came in, sat on the table in front, and said that the collapse of the wall had really screwed up his course.  He was clearly nonplussed.

As I have indicated, objectivity seemed in those general education classes pretty hard to come by.  Such was the case with US-Soviet Relations.  The professor had been schooled by Henry Kissinger and his whole analysis of the situation was based in the realpolitic of, as we fondly called it, BOP or Balance of Power.  When the wall came down, the BOP between the US and the Soviet Union dissolved, and so did the Professor’s course.

Boy, did those realists gloat.  They wrote that the fall of the Soviet Union proved the realist philosophy since, in balancing against the USSR, we had forced them to collapse.  Professors, I mean guys with Ph.D’s, actually wrote, “The USA won the Cold War.”  To which I can only say, BS.  I mean who wins Armageddon. 

The Cold War was an incalculable waste of human energy, talent, lives, and money on both sides of the BOP equation.  The USSR, scared to death of being invaded given its history, spent 20% of its GNP on war and preparation for it.  They didn’t have money for other things—like consumer products—except maybe to send some poor lonely guy into outer space. I mean is the guy who comes out standing after a total debacle the “winner” and of what exactly, the debacle sweepstakes?

Mostly though I kept my opinions to myself.  So the students came out hearing nothing but the “realist” perspective.  True, the Professor did assign a book on something called the “reformist” position; but he did not lecture on that position and the book was a terribly written mishmash of this and that. 

What I gradually came to see was that, at least in the world of academia, the realist position was a way of establishing the disciplinary boundaries of political science at least in the realm of international relations.  The real enemy of the realpolitic in that realm was not something called “reformism,” but “liberal economics” (or more exactly, the Economics Department).

At the heart of the realm politics was and is the “nation-state.”  That’s what is balanced in the BOP; nation states in various entangling alliances against other nation states.  But liberal economics, following good old Adam Smith, opposes limitations on the free flow of goods from any one place to another.  And one of the limitations to that free flow has been and continues to be people who believe in the nation state and who might erect therefore economic policies designed to protect and favor the members of its particular nation state.

So the realpolitic wasn’t about nations fighting nations, but about political science asserting its right to study the nation state when liberal economics says most of that is just stuff that gets in way.  What this has to do with objectivity, I don’t know.

Bacteriophobia and the Writing Instructor

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.