Politics and Teaching: Writing the English Language

Once upon a time, in the last third or so of the 20th c., I had a conference with a student who had started an informal essay, "Since the beginning of time, Man ...." Now, a line like that had been used in TV deodorant commercials a bit earlier, so I found the line funny — but the student wouldn't know that.

I asked the student "Do you count 'the beginning of time' from the Big Bang, or the Biblical Creation, or, locally, for the rise of human consciousness? And does 'Man' include Woman and our entire species?"

A couple questions later, the student clarified that what his topic involved was, "Me and my friends back in high school." So I asked, "Then why not begin, 'Me and my friends back in high school,' if that would be decorous — appropriate for Speaker, target audience, and subject matter — or, 'Back when we were in high school, my friends and I ...'?" He asked, "You mean it's okay to write about *that*?" And I responded, "Well, if that's what you want to write about, and you can fulfill the assignment, and you can make it interesting and maybe useful to a likely audience — yeah."
And then I put more delicately than this, "'Cause otherwise you're just bullshitting. (When I said it can be a good idea to start with a general introduction and get more specific, I didn't mean *cosmic*, and in a short essay, skip the Intro. and just spit out your thesis or its equivalent. Anyway, skip the pretentious horse-pucky)."

He had been trained to write like that.
He had been invited to bullshit.

And such training, along with huckster hyperbole, misplaced tolerance for b.s., fashionable relativism on — let's call it — the nakedness of emperors, and failure to listen closely not just to others but to ourselves: *that* is part of the reason English in 2018 is contributing to bad politics as much as it did in 1946, when George Orwell complained about "Politics and the English Language."

A Teaching Issue: "Blind" Grading

Here's one statement of a policy of mine when I was teaching. 

"'BLIND' GRADING: There are limits on the practice, but I grade written work 'blind,' not looking at the name of the author until after I've assigned a grade." 

When I refereed for journals I also tried to ignore authorship when a name slipped through — the essays were supposed to be "anonymized" — or when I could guess. And when I read scripts I usually tried not to look up names at all or not until late in the judgment part of the process.

I started teaching at the University of Illinois (Urbana) about 1966/67, during US warfare in Vietnam, when a male student's flunking out of school could make him immediately subject to military conscription and, possibly, "Sent to Vietnam to kill or be killed or wounded or maimed — and my blood is on your hands!", as we also-draftable Teaching Assistants used to bitterly joke about student grade appeals.

With that issue in the background, to grade blind was one of the first decisions I made about teaching when I started out, and I decided that working a bit against biases, likes, or dislikes in assigning a grade was more important than any advantages from getting to know students a bit better as human beings, tracking their development in the course — etc. 

I am not now nor I ever been an orthodox "New Critic" — looking at words on a page and considering nothing but the words on the page — but I consciously opted to deal, when grading, with a text as text, leaving out as much as possible the human author.

I did have some "I-Thou" moments with students and made some friends (and at least two open enemies plus one weirdo who gave me [?] a scathing evaluation on Rate My Professor for a course I never taught). 

This far, anyway, I opted out of the "Teach the whole child" movement — "College Is For Grownups" for one thing — and went over to an "I-It" relationship more than I needed to. 

Martin Buber says that impersonal I-It relationships are usual and normal and okay so long as there's the potential for "I-Thou": "I" dealing with "you" as a real Mensch on both sides, directly, human and humanely. If the Other in an encounter can be replaced by an ATM or a beverage-delivery device, it's probably not a situation for I-Thou. I sometimes thought that for a number of my students I could be replaced by a grading machine, and I sometimes felt — near the end of a pile of essays — that I *was* something of a grading machine and most of my students mechanisms churning out essays.

And I was definitely long enough in the Ed Biz and just long enough in the script-reading biz not to privilege scholars and scriptwriters all that much over their (usually) precursor-forms of college students. 

ANY COMMENTS OUT THERE ON INTENTIONAL DEPERSONALIZATION between teachers and students (and perhaps also superiors and inferiors in work-place and other hierarchies)? 

Teaching Controversies: Global Warming

            An energetically polemical editorial in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel on "Global warming in the classroom" asserts that "Indiana" — presumably the Indiana General Assembly — erred in passing "an 'academic freedom resolution giving teachers great latitude in how they help students 'analyze and critique scientific theories,'" finding that resolution "almost an invitation to teach flat-Earth-theory mumbo jumbo and Earth-is-the center-of–the-universe nonsense" (22 June 2017).

            I taught a course in rhetoric and composition on "The Literature of the Life Sciences" where students analyzed and wrote about scientific controversies, including the "nonsense" of the theory of spontaneous generation: that under the proper conditions, life nowadays can arise and develop: e.g."if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog," as Hamlet puts it, or later when what we'd call bacteria arise in a suitable medium exposed to air.

            Spontaneous generation theory went against the Book of Genesis and its assertion that creatures were, well, created and since then reproduce "each after its kind" — but it was widely accepted until effectively exploded by elegant experiments, notably by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

            Studying that debate teaches science as a method — not a body of facts that dispel nonsense — but a method and as a human activity with social, political, philosophical, theological, and historical contexts. (Why wasn't there religious opposition to spontaneous generation theory the way there was to evolution?)

            Similarly, why did educated Europeans and others from ancient Greece on deny the evidence of their senses and come to believe the Earth wasn't flat, if lumpy, but a sphere? And how can we know that they knew? (Hint: Check the "ball and scepter" motif with kings: they don't hold a plate to signal power on our planet.)

            And, of course, it took a long time for the theory of a sun-centered universe to be accepted, and long time after that before the universe expanded to the universe or multiverse of today. (And I've got $100 for the favorite charity of the writers of "Classroom" if any one of them can write out from memory the main evidence for why common sense is wrong and the sun does not revolve around the Earth.)

            A tough job for teachers is getting kids interested, and those kids should at least be curious why their elders are so exercised over whether and how the Earth is warming and what, if anything we can and should do about it if it is.

            There's a great teaching opportunity there, not preaching some truth or other. It's just that teaching controversies requires broadly-educated teachers perhaps team teaching, and literate people reading essays of analysis, not giving multiple-choice tests.