The Deep End of the Pool

I’ve been talking a lot to people lately about what I call the “information assumption,” by which I mean the fact, as it seems to me, that students below a certain (an uncertain, more like) maturity level tend strongly to assume that the mental work of getting educated amounts to information transfer only. It’s as if there’s a ladder with rungs representing positions on the Perry scale of college-age intellectual development (q.v.), and although they can peer into the territory that’s visible only from near the top, their grasp and their balance rest upon rungs further down. From the top one can see the need for continual self-monitoring and self-improvement, plus the professionalism entailed in our use of principles to decide things responsibly despite uncertainties, but our students’ hands and feet aren’t there yet. They seem able to handle only information, and they therefore interpret our instructions badly, translating them in terms of a clumsy dichotomy of fact and opinion where received notions are taken for facts needing no support, and opinion is treated as arbitrary preference needing ditto.

This is frustrating for teachers, and pretty much everyone I know (including you, dear reader?) feels the need to reeducate young people away from the oversimplifications they seem to have been saddled with. It’s tempting, though, to blame it all on high school, on No Child Left Behind, but I think present trends in secondary education are not solely to blame, nor even mostly: they merely exacerbate a condition that has always existed. In a world of perfect justice and maximally enlightened pedagogy, first-year college students (most students, really) would still need to make their way up the Perry scale, and profs will always find their patience tested by the slowness of that progress.

I just had an energizing talk with my next semester’s assistant. Feeding her selections from my handout material will kickstart my overdue revision of same, and it will also help me make the transition from this semester’s lit courses to next semester’s composition sections.

I can’t help feeling disappointed that my recent run of literature courses is coming to an end with the remaining full-time faculty, on average, increasing their loads. But composition teaching has its own beauties and rewards, as this weblog exists to elucidate. So here goes . . .

This year’s theoretical challenge is to relate the rhetoric of the college essay to that of the artwork, in terms of the biopragmatism I’m developing elsewhere. For starters, we admit that we are effectively unequal to the challenge posed by our object’s complexity: it’s well and truly over our heads–i.e. it’s the deep end of whatever pool we imagine ourselves in. Stroke . . .stroke . . . This is where we either learn to swim or don’t, or drown, which of course alludes to the infamous Drowning Mickey Mouse Diagram. I’ll make it my business to provide you (and my future students, down the line) with a suitably animated graphic thereof, but for now it suffices to say that it represents the rhetoric of argument as delineated by Stephen E. Toulmin, a follower of Wittgenstein who eerily resembles a Deweyan pragmatist. Representative of any given argument, any attempt to persuade others to share a belief, Mickey too is in the deep end of the pool, and in order to rescue him from drowning, we must bring as much of our argument to the surface, that is to conscious awareness and public discussability, as we can. That includes reaching down into the murky depths of unexamined assumptions, dark motives, and the flimsy backing of ideological rationalizations. There is no hope of bringing it all to the surface–in William Stafford’s very apt phrase, the darkness around us is deep–but we are ethically bound to make the attempt anyway.

My Buddhist faith instructs me to begin the day with four great vows, each of which is impossible for a finite being to fulfill: however innumerable sentient beings are,I vow to save them all; however inexhaustible delusions are, I vow to extinguish them all; however immeasurable Dharma teachings are, I vow to master them all; however endless the Buddha’s way is, I vow to follow it . . .

Of course, a lot depends on what “save” means, etc. I also vow to ignore such quibbles. If we are doomed to fail, if heat-death must eventually overtake the universe, it seems to me all the more important to act as if our actions matter. Do go off the deep end, please, and help me save Mickey.

Au revoir, . . .

Yes, I’m diving into the deep end again. And thanks–I missed you, too.

Message of the day: we often read, lately, that incoming students are on average disappointed to find too little intellectual challenge. In a way I hope it’s true, because I intend to bump up the conceptual difficulty of my courses a healthy notch or two, shocked as I was to find that Rate My Professor disses me as a lightweight in that category. Robert J. Kloss has something to say on this matter that I feel is crucial: that a nudge toward intellectual maturity works much better than a shove. Even one student’s nudge is another’s tipping point, though, so I’ll still tread lightly and strive to personalize whatever interventions I try to make.

My intent regarding this weblog is, among other things, to keep you posted on how that bump-up works out, but I also want to advertise the fact that the bulk of my blogging energies will henceforth be devoted to the youngest member of the Pangborn family of web presences, the newly-bloggified The Biopragmatist, which concerns my attempt to connect the disparate threads of my working philosophy into a usable, discussable semiotic/poetic/rhetorical perspective, with insights drawn from Peirce and Dewey, cognitive science, philosophy of biology (see, it’s about the kind of critter we are), Buddha dharma, and much else. So please check it out! I hope to attract and maintain an ad-hoc working group on these matters, so I’ll appreciate any and all feedback, but especially active engagement.

More later, naturally . . .

I’m enjoying some quiet time in the office at Normal State for a while, waiting for students to show up for individual conferences. I hope to soon be able to deeply redesign my freshman writing courses by partly automating them in a hybrid of online and face-to-face instruction. I take it that the preponderance of data indicates that hybrid is the most effective design for learning’s sake (I’ll have to double-check that, but I know it was true several years ago), although it’s not quite as thrifty as fully online courses are with the institution’s resources.

If I can swing it, I’d like to have one or more of the campus computer nerds help me to format sentence-level punctuation and clarity instruction into an engaging game-like online format. Of course, this would require me to make up an interminable sequence of problems for the students to solve. Bummer. But if I could embed one of the textbook sites’ problem sets into a CMS (course management system) that fed each individual a certain type of problem (comma splices, dangling modifiers, etc.) until they achieved, say, five right answers in a row, I would be able to shift from three weekly hours of full classes to more small group meetings and even more one-on-one. I imagine just a few mass meetings, more 90-minute team sessions, and even more individual conferences. The work load would stay the same, but it would be better allocated–that is, allocated proportionately to the modalities of learning that work best.

The worst problem might be with scholarly integrity: my design could be seen by some as practically an invitation to cheat, to pay someone else to go through the automated drudgery of online punctuation lessons. But I could fix that bug by explicitly holding them responsible for learning that shows up in their in-class writing. If anyone has advice for me about this, please let me know. Meanwhile, it’s once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. . . .

I’m having to delete several posts per day, now. If it keeps up, perhaps someone will clue me in on how to exterminate the pests. Meanwhile, if anyone wants a great deal on homemade viagra . . .

A comment on a previous post deserves to be displayed up front:

“You have a way with words, but remember by and large, English is a tool for hiding the truth”

I thank the poster for his or her kind words about my way with them (the return url takes me to a very new, blank-profile member of an automotive discussion group, no further), but the thing I want to feature here follows the “but.” Sometimes I wish I could forget the fact, but yes indeed, language, the medium that enables us to tell the truth, necessarily also enables us to lie, no question about it—except for the question of degree. I’m not so sure about that “by and large,” if it means most of the time.

Experience tells me something more like 50/50, and my optimistic disposition makes me act as though truth has at least a slight edge. Socrates was right to say truth has the ultimate rhetorical advantage, but he was only right in general, in the abstract, not in every particular situation. It’s as natural to dodge and parry verbally as it is to wear camouflage when someone is hunting you. We don’t expect fawns to say “Here I am, wolf–come ‘n get it.” I’m convinced that most of the time, those who use language to camouflage their real intentions do it because they think or feel they have to. Some people—some lawyers, for example—do end up lying for a living. Even so, I would bet that most don’t enter law school with that intention.

At any rate, I always raise this issue in class. The techniques of persuasion can be used for good or evil, so it’s important for teachers to show our awareness of the dark side while we try as well to stand forth as models of integrity and intellectual humility. Someone I can’t recall once wrote that lecturing on academic humility is beneath our dignity; I think that person quite mistaken. But it’s tricky. Push leads to pushback.

The most engaging competition among young college students might well be the cynicism contest. Sadly, nobody wins that one, except maybe those who opt out of it. Let’s at least try to keep the integrity option visibly on offer.