[lit-ideas] Re: What's wrong with Campus Watch for all?
- From: John Wager <johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 03:31:30 -0600
Subject:
Re: [lit-ideas] Re: What's wrong with Campus Watch for all?
From:
John Wager <johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:
Thu, 01 Apr 2004 10:56:33 -0600
To:
lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Robert Paul wrote:
> . . .I'm not oblivious to the financial straits of many who would like
> to attend
> and do attend college. I know of them not only by description but by
> acquaintance. However, what this has to do with the question isn't at
> all clear.
> (I've asked independently for clarification, but have received none.)
> On the one
> hand we have people suffering at the hands of Maoists, professors
> obsessed with
> archaic Greek sculpture and Duchamp, and on the other--? Truth, light,
> justice,
> fairness, every 'view' balanced by an opposing view, no matter how
> absurd? Who
> could be against that? It might occur to people that students are
> engaged by,
> attracted to, the forceful expression of views (theories, positions)
> that are
> not only false, but palpably so. It's the spectacle that attracts
> them, the
> passion, the experience of seeing someone committed to something for a
> change.
> An education which didn't include some taste of this would be a drab,
> pedantic
> wasteland.
>
THIS is the kind of thing I was trying to elicit a while back in asking
about the "aesthetics" of teaching. Surely there is a place for
"passion" in teaching as well as clarity--But on what grounds do we make
the choice of how much of each? This isn't just an "instrumental"
question about which is the most effective in "educating" students; it's
a question about our own aesthetic preferences and our desire to help
students see the value of those preferences as well. Asking Franz Klein
to paint like Mondrian would be impossible, and yet they are both
interesting painters. Asking Malcolm to respond to the student's
questions with a more rational response would likewise be unwise; there
is an aesthetic dimension to teaching that we don't seem to deal with
explicitly, and yet it controls much of how we teach and how we organize
our courses.
> I'll go farther. I'll say that a perfectly balanced intellectual menu is
> implicitly an insult to students, who are on my view far more capable
> than Eric
> may believe at spotting nonsense and sorting things out, and who might
> like to
> take part in the messy fun of doing so. Of course, this will vary
> according to
> discipline and subject matter--or would seem to. I remember though
> watching a
> very bad film--Italian, I think--years ago on public television.
> Galileo walks
> into a lecture hall in which the galleries are packed with students.
> He begins
> to lecture on Copernicus. Boos, jeers, catcalls. They know a priori
> he's wrong,
> right? Maybe not a priori.
>
"MESSSY!" That's a great way to organize a class: Deliberately organize
it to BE more "messy" so that students have to deal with the mess. But
organize it so that the mess is periodic, and controlled. It would be
boring for a teacher who likes messes to try to be a Mondrian lecturer,
even though Mondrian does have a different "aesthetic" that has its own
charm.
So when teachers start to "create," whether it's in the design of a
course or the delivery of an hour's worth of content, how much do they
think about the aesthetic dimension of this? SHOULD they be more
conscious of these kinds of choices, or is it better left up to the
unconscious, creative spark that's behind much creativity?
[This message was originally returned to me with an error message and
not delivered; my ISP mail error was:
Action: failed
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Anybody else having similar problems? I wrote three messages at the same
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