Talking About Teaching

What follows are a few thoughts triggered by the difficulty I've been having with drafting a statement of teaching philosophy. Why is it, I wonder, that so many educators are better at doing the pragmatic work of teaching than they are at articulating the philosophy behind their teaching? Is the gulf between our practice and our theory something to worry about? I want to suggest that this gulf derives at least in part from the fact that our teaching goals are so often multiple, inconsistent, even incongruous. . . .

• On the one hand, good teachers want to provide students with the knowledge and skills that will eventually enable them to become equal partners in disciplinary conversations. On the other hand, we want to model forms of democratic discussion premised on the presumption of equality in the present.

• On the one hand, good teachers often reward students who exhibit the cool-headed composure characteristic of rational thinkers. On the other hand, we encourage students to cultivate the passionate attachments that motivate innovative thinking and persuasive argumentation.

• On the one hand, good teachers want to help students learn to think critically about literature, cultural materials, and the problems facing our world today. On the other hand, we want to expose our students to cultural materials that they can feel good about: materials that provide models of a better world, and that function as mooring posts for their optimism, curiosity, and generosity.

That list could go on for ever. But those brief examples should suffice to establish that the best teachers make use of eclectic methods to accomplish goals which are not only multiple but often contradictory. And it's a good thing, too!

Sensation and Sensibility

I've been wanting to post this eloquent passage from Mary McCarthy on how sensation and sensibility can become detached from (and then reconverge with) one another:

Sensation and sensibility are at their height in the child; its thin, tender membrane of perception is constantly being stabbed by objects, words, and events that it does not understand. In lieu of understanding the child ‘notices.’ Think of [. . .] the beginning of Dr. Zhivago, where the child Yury, taken to his mother’s funeral, looks out the window at the cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold, in the winter fields. Yury, being a child, cannot comprehend the important event that has happened to him (death), but his eye takes in the shivering cabbages. Everyone experiences something like this in moments of intense grief or public solemnity, such as funerals; feelings, distracted from their real causes, attach themselves arbitrarily to sights, smells and sounds. But a child passes a good part of his life in this attentive state of detachment.

-- Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction,” Partisan Review 28:2 (March-April 1961), 176-7.

Slow Reading

Another manifestation of the slow learner is the close reader:

Close reading is slow reading, a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax, and form.

That's from Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature, 98.

You Can Vote

Because I keep running into smart people who say that they're not going to vote, what follows is a bit of wisdom from David Foster Wallace on voting (from Up, Simba):

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

I love that last point! But the irony is that people who don't vote have already internalized that point. On some level, they experience the act of not voting precisely as a vote, an act, a redemption of agency. But DFW reminds us that the compensatory feeling of agency derived from one's recalcitrant refusal to vote ultimately amounts to a relinquishment of one's political agency. Such is the double-bind of all actions motivated by the duplicitous feeling of ressentiment.

So this post is just intended to say that yes, you can . . .

Writing. Wrestling . . .

. . . with the alterity of language. I quote Leo Bersani, from an interview called "Beyond Redemption":

We’re usually not aware of the gap between the body that we’re happy to live in and this language which is not a creation of that body but on which we depend and which we use instrumentally so easily. Of course people have talked about that famous ‘otherness of language’ – but I think it becomes very physical and felt when you write, [. . .] and I think that’s different from the other kinds of professions that one might engage in. I mean the language is to writing what the football is to football but for the football player the football itself is not something that’s troubling, that is, this difference between the object and the person using it is not troubling. Whereas, in writing, you want to be identical to that foreign object from which you’re different. And I guess what happens in certain moments is that language comes to realize a certain rhythm in yourself – and it really is a rhythm where I can’t distinguish between mental and physical.

I prefer the pen. But every so often a ball is nice.

Knowing. Really . . .

"The difficult part," as Eve Sedgwick has written in her memoir on affective pedagogy, A Dialogue on Love, "isn’t what you need to know, but how to go about really knowing it. . . ."

Pedagogy, that is, entails not just teaching content, but finding the framework – the form and context – that is amenable and appropriate to the knowledge.

The form? Knowledge not just in its conceptual abstraction, but, say, in its affective tonality, or its pragmatic effectivity, its resonance and relation with real life.

The context? The frame of mind. Or maybe the location in the body. The pragmatic surround, as the private and/or interpersonal ambiance, in which it can have meaning.

To go about really knowing it. Or, as Sedgwick continues: "Acknowledging the reality, my brother would say. Realizing. Being the slow learner . . ."