Fevered Ramblings, Direct Questions

I want to share with all of you the conversation that I had with Farid (Matuk, US) and Monica (Bullock, LS), and I suppose more importantly, the way I’ve been contemplating that conversation. After discussing Linda’s two questions—how/do we teach thriving-in-a-changing-world skills, how do we teach writing—I’m not at all confident that I do either as well as I’d like. As blogs inspire a speculative, yawpish style, I will be as candid and direct as I can. In other words, this is my first draft.

With respect to the changing-world-skills, I quoted from my own course plans: Hopefully, I am teaching some kind of critical thinking skills. Thinking about a text, about a peer’s interpretation, about a teacher’s assessments, about one’s own performance. Farid and Monica wanted a change in diction…interpretive eye, reflective, creative thinking, but not critical thinking. Now, I am always on guard against recycling bits from one class to the next, usually careful to tweak assignments from one year to the next. My language might often get stale before I realize it. I’d better have a good reason for prying pet-words from my students. [From what I can tell, this faculty hasn’t yet perceived a staleness to the word “model” as a verb, and I am prepared to hear the phrase “It is what it is” until I earn Legend status.]

Farid admitted that this [ahem] critical thinking in discussion is what excites his students the most, the possibility that, of these sixteen opinions, those twelve might all be viable options, might all be meaningful for the reader. I squirmed. Ought we not, I asked, appeal--at some point--to a poet’s biography, a poet’s historical context, a poet’s choice of genre, to whittle down some of those viable options? Doesn't an examined life produce the best kind of closed-mindedness? Closed to cheap answers, closed to intellectual fads, closed to lazy rhetoric? Isn’t it the duty of an interpretive viewer of the world to call “Bullsh*t” openly, confidently? Monica (love Monica!) suggested that maybe it was a good thing that the US had both of our approaches. Wait, I have an approach? What is it? You mean I’m not the guy teaching his students to tear pages out of their texts? [Punches self in jaw for getting married, buying house, starting family. Buys cigarettes and gin.]

Okay, I said, so howzabout what we’re doing here? Howzabout for a skill “Shape and sustain a meaningful dialogue, be one of those people upon whom nothing is lost”? Farid asked me to explain the “sustain” part. This led me to consider how I teach writing by means of discussion. Long pauses. Let a question hang unanswered. Frustrate the students’ expectations that each comment has to be blessed, tweaked or refuted by me before anybody else can speak. Isn’t that what readers of, say, Homer are doing on a daily basis…aren’t they offering that umpteenth opinion on a text that has already been explained (by Socrates, by SparkNotes)? And Monica (love Monica!) said, You know what you need—you need an authentic audience.

[Insert energy-inefficient light bulb]

Throw out anything without an authentic audience. Make them write letters, make them write to one another, make them answer one another. [Briefly fights temptation to quote mission statement. Succumbs.] Recreate the changing world by means of our diverse community of learners.

In that spirit, then, let me address you as an authentic audience. On what basis do we say we’re doing well? On what basis do we, as a department, act as authorities on the text? On what basis do we decide not to change a damned thing about assignment X or text Y?