Concerning powerpoint pt. 1

Well, my shift for the day started around 7:00, which is also coincidentally when my wife finally got to sleep.

The boy.

But as I've gotten up early enough, I figured I could put in some face time on my blog. That or I could read the veritable novels that Blowing Shit Up With Gas and Avram Hooknoobie, Grand Master Of All That Is Writ have posted since last I checked. No. I don't suppose I have that many hours to kill, so I will respond to commentary here, and just say that the whole Chris is Risen thing was very funny and very short, and that Avram, you take a better picture of my stuff than I do. Perhaps you could make some money selling it on Ebay, and yes that is a link to your precious NEW blog.

I am not doing a powerpoint presentation at my upcoming conference. It is a humanities conference, and at humanities conferences we have rules. I don't know what they do at marketing seminars Mr. B.S.U.W.G., but at a "symposium" we do not show video clips of Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure.

B and T are performed via sock puppets (and only part one, mind you; none of that Bogus journey crap--we still have standards). But I digress because I was going to talk about the fall of mankind (again).

So, let's start with this: there is perhaps nothing so unfullfilling as teaching composition to college freshmen. Seriously. Nothing. Here's why. Teaching composition (or comp for short) puts you on the front line against critics of academia everywhere. I am not going to discuss here the various valid points in their arguments, suffice to say one of their claims is that college doesn't teach people anything and that it is, in a sense, a four year long party. Their evidence for this is often that people come away from college without the ability to write. I agree, but for different reasons. I, for instance, would point out that people also come away from college without the ability to multiply fifteen by twelve without pad and paper, but no one cares about that. Maybe the problem here is that college, in order to get people jobs, has made this great error in judgment by enacting academic programs that are far from academic.

Let me try this another way. For those of you who don't know, there's this discipline called business. I've nothing against the discipline, it's just the most obvious example of what I'm discussing. So, business. What do they teach, exactly, in business. Accounting? No, that's accounting. Marketing? No, that's marketing. Economics? No, that's economics. Well then, what do they teach in business?

Two things: power point and the writing of emails.

Now, you may say, why are you picking on business. I'm not. To tell you the truth, the whole thing started with Engineering right after WWII. They needed a bunch of engineers and so they geared college towards the teaching of engineering. The university has really never recovered. And so, now, it is the college's job to train you to do a job which you would probably be better trained to do with on the job training.

Furthermore, even those disciplines which are not vocation centered, but rather centered around theoretical positions, have ultimately fallen by the wayside or begun to follow the other basic formulation. Take psych, for instance. Do psych students learn anything about the history of psychology. No. They learn what psychologists are doing TODAY, so that they can enter the job market right now and start doing what they're supposed to be doing as soon as possible.

What's the problem, you ask? Well, think of it as a difference of viewpoints. The old college felt that it's job was to make you wise enough so that you could bring to bear all that you knew regarding your current situation at hand to come to a responsible decision tempered by current and historical practices. The new college wants you to memorize which drugs go with which conditions. If the condition doesn't have a known analog in the pharmaceutical world, you are without recourse. You may prescribe the next best thing, but that implies some knowledge of "type," a question of relationships between the various drugs, which your education didn't feel was necessary to teach you in order to get you into the psychology job market.

My own discipline is the last holdout against this new kind of university because I am part of an English department; there is absolutely no job directly related to English except English professor--which admittedly, I am training to become. Instead, English teaches the discernment of relationships based off of the nuances of language. The higher up you go in the study, the more subtle these nuances can become, and the more broadly is language defined. We teach, in short, analysis--how to determine from what's in front of you, what's being said. There is also, of course, a historical component. As we study things that have been said, we have at times singled out more important things that have been said from less important (more pithy, more wise, more controversial, more interesting, whatever), and thus, are able to bring to bear a certain lay-expertise on a variety of subjects. We may not be able to quote physics equations, but we can quote what physicists have said about physics. I have read John Meynard Keynes, for instance. How many business majors have read Keynes before they talk about Keynesian economics?

But back to my original point, there is this thing run out of the English department called comp, and it is normally held as the single most obvious failing of the university, because there are students who pass out of comp who can't write. Well....

Never mind the fact that we are trying to teach students to write papers for any number of disciplines and that an English paper looks different than a business proposal looks different than a computer science tech manual. Forget all that.

Never mind the fact that business departments are sometimes pissed when their students can't graduate because they failed some English class their freshmen year or the fact that 90% of the deparments on campus now, being based solely on a specific profession, have nothing to do with writing.

If you go to college to become an aerobics instructor, what the hell do you care that you can't write an essay? What do your professors care? Honestly.

See, comp is a holdover from the old way of thinking about the university where everyone is trained to be wise, and one of the things that "wisdom" means is eloquence. But no one's really trained to be eloquent anymore. Hell, even being able to speak English is no longer a requirement, so eloquence is pretty far down the list.

But if this notion goes, then so goes everything else, because if the university isn't teaching people how to be wise, then why have universities at all? Why not just do on the job training? The last sign that the university is fostering intelligence rather than teaching people job skills is its ability to foster writing skills, and so we'd rather have the university do this badly than not at all--just so long as no one really fails just because they can't write.