What students love. The book group had been meeting every other Tuesday for several weeks, and many good ideas about the campus came up for discussion along the way. But I sat up and took note when a colleague said this:

Students love it when faculty 'own up' to not knowing something. (R. duC)

I connected this sentence immediately to another thought I had been carrying around for a few weeks, something spoken by a teacher to a group of students:

I don't know how you will apply this [thing we are studying] in your life. (Source lost)

Seen together, the two sentences help teachers remember why students aspire to be the center of their own learning. It's respectful for us to help them do so, and important, too, since they become the users of the knowledge that is passed down and reshaped for new times and invented wholesale along the way. And between the respect and the potency of knowledge that they get to work with, students become energized as learners. You remember whenever you've witnessed such a thing in your own school.

Too often, however, we behave as though we know down deep that we must ventually pass along the cultural heritage, the tools and habits of mind and bodies of information that is our common property, but we don't want to let it quite out of our hands just yet:

No, you can have this stuff later. You know, it's the good stuff, so we can't let you try it out just yet. While you're waiting, could you memorize this other stuff here for a quiz? [0 & P]

What students like. And furthermore, about that conference on the weekend: students like challenges, they like to dig deep once they get a taste for it. They like feeling alive, feeling that their brains are alive, that what they do matters, that they have something serious to think about, that they can play seriously with ideas, that they can be respected, that there are other people exploring the world around them. Remember that feeling? If not, why not? [0 & P]

Underestimating. I was off at a graduate student conference this weekend in California, and I've been remembering years ago that I went to an undergraduate conference. The first was for interdisciplinary M.A. programs in liberal studies, and the second was for peer tutors in the world of writing centers. In both cases, a cautionary reminder for teachers: we habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students. Say it again: we habitually underestimate our students. [0 & P]

Henry Miller on blogging. Area teacher, actor, and blogger Michael Coffee sent along this quotation from Henry Miller:

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir. (Books in My Life, ch. 12)

There's a nice hint in there of the pleasures of free speech, and a cautionary note, perhaps, about teachers too quickly assuming that their writing assignments feel like liberation to the students who must carry them out.

Michael picked up the Miller quotation from Indianapolis blogger Stan Denski, who posts it in his sidebar. Stan has a good eye for quotations -- see the Rilke poem also in the sidebar, or his posting of some of his favorite political quotations. A sample:

"The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning." ~Adlai E. Stevenson

"Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel." ~John Quinton

Also via Stephen Fox. [0 & P]

The pedagogical wisdom of the martial arts movie. In martial arts movies, the student must submit fully to the master and to the structure of the particular discipline the master teaches. Once the young person does so, the wisdom and power and even freedom of that structure gets into the student's head and heart and body. In due time, the young person is certified, step by step, into the levels of mastery. The weight of hundreds of years of tradition, the insight of hundreds of teachers, are codified into the instruction, and further into the being of the student.

What does the student contribute? Submission, desire, growing strength of character, persistance, bravery, eventually creativity and insight. Anything from her own experience? Yes, whatever allows her to commit to the progression of lessons and workouts, but no, nothing that influences the structure of the form itself, as far as we can tell. The tradition is a river that runs through each practitioner, bigger than each one and not much changed by having this cork bobbing along.

The final scenes of the films are always moving -- violent, but inspiring, with all the persuasive audio and visual tools of cinema turned toward a focus of uplifting emotion. A young person has submitted to something greater than herself and has grown in the process. [Finally, she is able to kick the bad guy in the face, or someting just as good!] The sound track tells us how to interpret the final kick -- it is a triumph of the human spirit.

And maybe it is. Yet in writing this account I find myself resisting the erasure of the student's knowledge and experience, as far as the martial art form is concerned. It is here that the pedagogical model of these films seems most dangerous, most satisfied with the authority of the tradition, at a time when we need people who can involve themselves in the inevitable reshaping of modern life. So that final uplifting emotion, linked to submission and violent triumph, doesn't satisfy, no matter how much it excites the audience.

We should be careful about turning to Hollywood for lessons in pedagogy . . . .

[Written just after seeing an old favorite, the original Karate Kid movie.] [0 & P]

Education and training. At a meeting of retired and retiring faculty today, one person recalled a conversation with a corporate officer from the region on the subject of hiring our graduates. The corporate person drew a distinction between two approaches to schooling young people:

"We can train your graduates if you have already educated them," he said, "but we can't educate them if you only trained them."

Most educators would instinctively accept the difference, I think, even though its real meaning goes unstated in the anecdote. On one side, perhaps the ability to follow procedures, to attend to decorum, to accomplish goals set by others, and on the other side, the ability to deal with uncertainty, to think critically, to bring revelevant information to solving a problem? The corporate officer was implying a model of adulthood and career that included both sets of values, a model in which education is the necessary foundation for training -- again, at the risk of using his undefined terms.

Training, when it takes place in schools, looks kind of like education; maybe we're fooled sometime into thinking we're doing the one when we've slid over into the other's territory. Teachers need time to reflect and to talk with each other about issues like this one; otherwise you find teachers working more or less in isolation from their peers doing odder and odder things and making mistakes they shouldn't be making. Their morale goes down and their get burned out, too. On a bad day, their style of teaching becomes cramped and suspicious, which won't work when your job is about inspiration and motivation and helping people become better versions of themselves.

PS. My father the retired accountant quickly complicated the discussion later by asking how I'd like engineers to be prepared for the workplace, a useful line of thought. [0 & P]

Playing with fire. Kids love it -- the campfire, the backyard fire pit, the fire on the beach. I watched a friend's kids trying to cook potatoes in foil, frozen corn in foil, ravioli in a homemade foil pot of water over the flames, and more. The adults kept a close eye on things; it was easy to think about safety the whole time while watching. But I could step back a little, too, and see the energy, the pleasure of experimenting, the caution around the flames, the fast-moving brains looking for new things to try out, the pride in accomplishment. "This is delicious," they said, these fifth or sixth graders, very happy with what they'd made. Educators need to be reminded about young people's best traits once in awhile. [0 & P]

The grab-bag of culture. In the line of duty I attended a concert just now, Panic at the Disco and three other bands in a big theater in the big city. There had been talk of a mosh pit, and sure enough, there was one. Some thousands of people stood for the entire concert, and those closest to the stage sometimes swept in waves back and forth as people shoved and pressed for advantage and wedged their way forward toward the stage. For reasons of duty, there I was in the pit, a new experience for me.

At one point, a teen standing near me said to her friend, "If someone falls, push into the spot where they were standing. I paid good money for this concert and I deserve to enjoy it. And I had to pay extra for a hotel!" It was a solid ten seconds of distilled and concentrated selfishness that you just don't see every day.

The bands were pretty good, though the place was so loud that I was happy to have the earplugs I'd brought along -- they were said to cut about 25 decibels from the volume, and I needed it. There were straightforward rockers with or without interesting lyrics -- the lead singer for the first group said something completely inane between songs (I should have written it down) and a person standing near me said, "That makes no sense." Other bands and songs had more interesting words -- as at the last concert I attended, the Decemberists, where the words are important and interesting, and the music is layered and both melodic and driving.

But of course some of the content in this new concert was simply and directly and crudely sexual. I was not entirely surprised. Our society has plenty of opportunities for people to experience that realm of expression, and adults tend to think that we can handle it without being harmed while young people should be protected. Now this concert was full of young people, mainly young girls, I'd say, and most of us wouldn't rent a movie with lines like the ones in the songs and then hand it to a 15 year old, say, with our recommendation.

As I was, as a matter of duty, doing my best to stand in the most pit, I realized something everyone else probably already knew. And that is that each generation assembles its life out of the full grab-bag of cultural material available at the time. Can a parent protect a child from some element of the culture? Not entirely, and not forever. Each of those selfish and less than selfish young people moshing away around me were going to make of the event, and the broader grab-bag of culture, what they will. A parent or an educator won't be making the decision for them.

Our duty is narrower and more alarming that I might have previously thought. If we surround our young people with the best things we know, the most interesting and powerful and challenging things we know, and we display the interpretive moves we make -- don't hide our own thinking, don't just assert authority and pull rank -- so that they see how to solve problems and make judgments, and they see that it's one of the serious responsibilities and pleasures of life, then when it comes time to grapple with something corrupt and corrupting that they pull out of the full grab-bag of culture that is available to them -- admit it, the full grab-bag of culture is theirs for the taking -- then they're be in a better place to make their own good and interesting judgments. And we'll watch from the edges of their lives -- we'll no longer be quite so close to the center, will we be? -- and as we watch we'll have at least a little good reason to hope for the best. [0 & P]

Aristotle on blogging. There at the bottom of my colleague's email today was this passage from the Greek philosopher:

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an action, but a habit.

So the virtue of writing every day, if we can be serious about it, if we can make it part of a cluster of habits and virtues: listening to others, thinking about what exactly they are saying and what exactly supports their perspective, testing our own ideas and experiences against those of others and without prejudice, and so forth.

And so the vice of writing every day, trying to win arguments no matter the cost, ranting at others, stacking the evidence, calling names, forgetting what you don't want to acknowledge, ridiculing differences, testing everything against your own beliefs, and so forth.

IF that's right, both ways, then blogging is a medium and a practice that gets quite a bit of its virtue or lack of virtue from what it associates with. That means that we don't really get anywhere at all urging people to blog -- we'd need to urge them to take up a whole package of practices and attitudes that wrap around blogging and that make it special. It's not blogging (or wikis or whatever the newest cool tool might be) alone. It's a whole package deal of virtue.

But blogging has going for it the repetition that Aristotle called for. That's one of the necessary ingredients of character. [0 & P]

The most significant change. "We are living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history," said Richard E. Miller at 1:25 of "The Future is Now," the video I posted yesterday. A little more than a minute into that piece, he turns from a general description of the excellence of the Rutgers University English Department to this vision for the future of a "New Humanities" that will engage English studies with the changes we are now seeing.

In a networked textual and image world, he says, people communicate instantly and globally; English, as a field that addresses human expression and culture, should be at the forefront of these developments. As people contribute to the making of knowledge on the web, English must train people to live in this new realm where authority has been remade. This stretches most people's vision of English studies to include images and moving images and is a portion of a larger reimagination of the humanities for the new century, Miller continues.

A collective and collaborative web is enriched by the contributions of the university -- the academy's sustained study and understanding -- and with this addition, he says, society is better positioned to live creatively and solve problems that we are facing. All students are served by training in the "central activity of multimedia composition," he says near the end. Multiply-authored, multiply-produced writing, says Miller, is the future.

A couple of years ago Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer began to explore the implications for pedagogy, too -- perhaps most efficiently introduced in "Teaching the Action Horizon," a headnote to their New Humanities reader.

It's still rare enough for academics to "get" what they're getting, and more unusual for them to see structural changes to the university as part of a proper response. [0 & P]