a brief interlude about honking

part 3 of my power point diatribe is coming, but first I wanted to let you all in on a new development in the honking. It seems, and I don't want to jinx this, to have stopped.

Because of the cop that sits near my house sometimes in resonse to my complaint? No. There's no such cop.

It just stopped one day. Or, more precisely, the day my wife called the police. It's almost as if the police called those involved and told them to knock it off...

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.

regarding power point pt. 2

Which brings me to my next point. Comp is a class where teachers attempt to teach people to write--people know that writing really isn't that important to their major, and who are told as such by the various practices and professors of their department.

Furthermore, comp teachers are under pressure by these various departments to both teach their students to write essays for their department (business wants you to teach business writing, psych wants you to teach psych writing), and to not flunk their students for not knowing how to write. Flunking a student in the wrong department, for those who need a metaphor, would be like getting grounded by the babysitter.

If you say, for instance, "I can't pass this student. Every time I ask them to write an essay they ask if they can make a powerpoint presentation!" Business is likely to retort that this is all the student needs to know how to do. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One of the major problems with people teaching in comp is that the teachers are either of two basic types, and I am one of them. Let us call my type the elitist.

The Elitist believes that one of the prerequisites for being in college is that you know how to write. If you don't, why the fuck are you here! Had I my power, there would be few schools with five digit student poplulations and WalMart would be well stocked with employees. Some people are just not, to be frank, college material. I do not base this view on economics or sexual preference, or race, or whatever. I base it on intelligence. Some people are dipshits, and it doesn't really matter that they can fork over twenty grand in tuition, they shouldn't be in college.

Other people, can write and should be in college, but in that case, why are they in my class, since I teach basic writing which they already know. If I were teaching some breed of advanced writing, I would understand, but I teach basic writing. As a result, I can divide my classes between two types of students: those who rocket through my class and who I attempt not to bore and those who will never get it, and who my attempts to help become a source of frustration. Don't get me wrong, as a teacher I'm an optimist. It's here that I'm a pessimist. While teaching I go more than the extra mile for my students; it's just that I've never seen a student turn in a barely literate essay at the beginning of the semester and turn in model work at the end. It never happens.

I'll be honest, I really don't think writing as writing can be taught. First you teach people to think interesting things, then they may have some motivation to write that shit down, but if you just say, "write an essay about something that you feel defines you," what the hell does that do? Make them write in every fucking course. Afterwards they'll know how to write. But you see I'm basing my opinion on the old model. In the new model, what would be the writing component of half the courses on campus. Two three to five page essays a semester generally, and normally, these are summaries of what's been read in class. We're not exactly talking personal engagement.

The other basic type of comp teacher is the paycheck gatherer, and whenever I think about my teaching experience with its faults, I need only hear about one of these people. These are teachers for whom anything goes. They learn writing, they don't learn writing, as long as they do the assignment and the teacher gets paid, everything is okay.

Now, you may be wondering, where are those true believers who think that writing can be taught and that this project is worthwhile? Well, first of all, you have to understand that a comp teacher is basically conscripted labor. Either the comp teacher is a grad student studying to teach literature (which is where you get the elitist) or they're studying to become poets. Nobody is actually studying to become a comp teacher, and those who do teach comp, those who are responsible for keeping up the purposefulness of our jobs, are generally running the show--in other words, not actually teaching any of these comp classes.

So, those who teach are generally those with the least vested interest in whether or not the thing they're teaching can be taught at all. Furthermore, while they're teaching it, they're under considerable pressure from all sides to pass the students despite an overwhelming lack of skills. From other departments there's disagreement about what skills a comp teacher should be basing the grade on, and from above, there is both the pressure not to piss off the other departments by flunking their students and the pressure to play out the philosophy that good writing can be taught (even if you know that you aren't teaching it, and you have suspicions that the entire enterprise is in bad faith).

Which brings me finally to my last point, and then a really good story about powerpoint, I swear.

Given that teachers with little confidence in their material must tap dance in front of a class for about two and a half hours a week (which doesn't sound long until you've tried to stand in front of people for two and a half hours over and over again and keep them interested). Anyway, given all these factors, is it any wonder that so much energy is spent on indoctrination? Honestly, I'm here at my university, attempting to become a literature professor, right? I haven't had a single class to help me in my profession. Not a one. Meanwhile, I have already had four semesters training in teaching comp. FOUR SEMESTERS. That's training in a profession that isn't mine, that I have no interest in at all. Two years.

My current training regimen, is in alternative teaching practices for composition, which is a class where we meet and talk about various ways that comp is taught at other institutions and that we might want to employ if we were ever to run a comp program. We are, of course, not to employ these practices at this university because the program is already layed out, and we probably won't get a chance to run these practices at another university because someone there will most likely be in charge, but it's important for us to see the abominations that are sometimes put forward at other universities to match the demands of their academic programs.

Now, also important to the story at hand is the fact that we as grad students can sign up to teach an experimental writing class which counts as freshman comp but is...experimental. The higher ups have to okay your design, but if they do, you can basically bust out of the mold. Of course, they only okay designs with significant mold busting properties, and they never okay anything that remotely resembles creative writing.

Last, Wednesday, a teacher of one of these experimental writing classes came to share with us her work. And here's the ultimate point of my story. She was teaching a class on multimedia essay production. Wait for it...wait for it....

Powerpoint.

She was teaching a fucking class on powerpoint in an English department.

Next semester, I'm proposing to teach "the illiterate essay" or "aerobics as discourse."

MIA

I have so much to report, but I can't...not yet. You see, this Saturday, I am giving a paper on the uses of Socrates for postmodern "theory." I told the Drivler about it, and he attempted to infect me with his...oh what's the politically correct term for madness these days. Anyway, he was successful at convincing me that I did not know enough about Socrates to talk about him in front of a room of strangers, who I will probably never see again, for ten whole minutes. I don't really know how he did it.

In any case, I'm reading Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy," I'm about halfway through Kierkegaards, "A Definition of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates." I've read the Apology, the Euthyphro, the Euthydemos (I think), Protagoras, and the Phaedrus, and I've re-read the opening hundred pages or so of Laszlo Versinyl's "Socratic Humanism." Meanwhile, I've also read a book on Neurology and Feminism (for my humanities class), and am now reading various short stories by W.D. Howells, pausing now and again to grade the forty five or so student essays that I just received today.

This is, by the way, an account of what I've done since late Thursday night.

I still have to write the ten page paper by 2 o'clock Saturday. Wish me luck!