March 2007 Archives

Once again I had students read portions of a book by Karen Horney, Neurotic Personality or something like that, that describes three neurotic types.  Moving towards, moving against, moving away.  And once again, though this is not always the case, the student work was better than usual.

I ask them to read Horney and then in their papers discuss which type they think they are.  I make clear at first that I do not mean to imply nor are they to infer that because they are this or that type that they are neurotic.  We are all a mix of the types I say (and of course this whole typing thing is pretty artificial), but probably we all incline more towards one of the types than the others, though over time and possibly from day to day the type that dominates changes or shades over into another.

This is the pitch.  Use the type as analytic category to shift through your own experience to detect if possible your over all inclination.  So while the students draw on their own experience (I don’t think this is self-expressive), they draw on it to illustrate their particular understand of the theory behind the analytic category.

The papers come out more organized.  I can’t say why.  Maybe it’s Horney’s thick description.  The attributes of each type are very much linked together.  Also the types play off against each other so it’s easier to see what sort of examples might help to illustrate the type.

Also possibly things come out a bit more organized because Horney’s understanding of neurosis is dialectical; one extreme leads to the other.  The moving against, for example, seeks to appear strong and powerful as a way of repressing a deep seated fear of dependence. The moving towards seeks to please others, to self-sacrifice, and self-efface to conceal feelings of indifference and hostility to others.

The assignment too is dialectical.  Students apply the type to experience (thereby giving shape to the experience), and the giving shape to the experience (since the experience surpasses the type in its implications) may lead to a deeper or altered understanding of the type (thus seeing different stuff in Horney than one might have seen before).

But the papers come out more organized and the level of student involvement in the writing goes up appreciably.  I would like to do more of this kind of stuff, but Horney is rare in psychoanalytic literature.  She writes clearly.

Something to do with the notion of self-development:

I therefore deduce, as the natural inference from what has been argued, that reason cannot desire for man any other condition than that in which each individual not only enjoys the most absolute freedom of developing himself his own energies, in his perfect individuality, but in which external nature itself is left unfashioned by any human agency, but only receives the impress given to it by each individual by himself and of his own free will, according to the measure of his wants and instincts, and restricted only by the limits of his powers and his rights.

Limits of State Action, Wilhelm Von Humboldt.

This sounds nuts of course, but how much more so than:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
 

Must people first be taught so that they might learn?
 

Or must people first learn so that they may be taught?

How do I know what I think till I see what I say.  I think EM Forster said that.                                        

This saying has something to do with my theory of the possible educative function of writing; of the function writing may serve as part of an education conceived as developmental.

 There are four “I’s” in that saying; the center of the saying is the self that speaks.  This form of writing is not “about the world,” nor is it a particularly a form of discourse.  Though it might appear in the form of a “rumination,” “speculation” or perhaps “essay.”  The name though one might give to the product is not as important as the function it might serve.

The function would be as the saying says “to know what one thinks.”  One may think one knows many things; but mostly one knows “beliefs,” “sayings,” edicts gathered from common sense.  One however does not know these things in the sense of saying them; rather such things have been said to one and one thereby learns them.

The knowing though, of which Forster speaks, only comes about by seeing what one says.  This suggests that one does not necessarily know what one thinks.  One says something and produces, in the case of writing, a social product.  Or let us say language is social, and having embedded one’s thought in that social situation, one may began to see the situation, the implications of what one has said, in that situation, the possible ellipses that might lead to another thought or in the wrong direction, the possible ambiguities that if followed, explored, and possibly explain.  This process of seeing what one has said might alter what one thinks.

One might think of Mead’s distinction between the “I,” as the vital core of the individual, and the “me,” as the "I" takes itself to be shaped or perceived by others.  The “me” self is exposed and out there in public when words take shape on the page.  Even if these words are only ever seen by the “I,” that they are out there and written down means that they might be potentially seen. 

The “I” then looks at the “me” and concludes that its hat is on crooked.  The “I” spontaneously sees things in the Me that might be changed, altered, corrected, or transformed. Through this back and forth process the “I” gradually comes to know what it thinks. 

When someone says, I have all that I need.  Now I will write it up—I always feel that for this person the “writing up” will not involve thinking, or coming to know what he or she thinks.  This might be called report writing.  But it is not the kind of writing I believe should be cultivated for the purposes of educative self-development.

When I first started teaching writing back in 1973 as a teaching assistant at SDSU, the head supervisor for all TA's made us write a one or two page statement about writing and what teaching it meant.  We all suspected that the supervisor wasn’t really interested in anything we had to say but was using the assignment to make sure we TAs could write ourselves in some fashion.

I wrote that I thought writing had something to do with thinking and that I couldn’t see teaching the one without in some way teaching the other.  The supervisor expressed appreciation for my writing and my sentiments.  And concluded with, “good luck!”

Now probably I wouldn’t write such a thing.  Even back then that “good luck” suggests the supervisor who had herself tried to teach writing respected my ambition but considered me naive.  Now writing and thinking don’t seem to go together; saying that one seeks to teach the one through the other and visa versa would now seem down right unsophisticated, if not platitudinous or perhaps simply specious.

But deep down inside, even with all the intervening years of reading about composition and composition theory, that’s still what I think. But who can say, after all, what thinking is much less what writing is.  So how the hell is one going to talk about either of these things and their possible inter-relationship?  Well, certainly, not by offering definitions of either.  Freud said, all thinking is a prelude to action and seems to suggest that most philosophizing is a form of pathology.  Heidegger says maybe the biggest thought of all is that we have not yet begun to think.

OK.  That’s cool.  But I am not thinking about what thinking or writing might be to a psychoanalyst or a philosopher.  I am thinking about writing and the teaching of it as an aid to thinking and one of the possible stepping stones in personal and psychological development. I am thinking of writing and thinking as an educator might. Here’s the part where I start to feel lonely.  Because every time I think down this road, I feel, at least, as if I am parting company with most of composition and composition theory, with the development of a discipline, and the whole idea of writing itself as an object of study.

Elements within the arena of composition and composition studies do seem to wish to import some thinking into the whole process.  Usually this is critical thinking and is allied with the social and political arm of the composition studies.  From my educative perspective I think the teaching of writing (and thereby thinking) must perforce have a social and political dimension.  Certain elements in our society, such as advertisers and some parts of the political and religious spectrum, would prefer that people not think, but simply believe.  And since I see writing as essential to the development of thinking my educative perspective has social and political repercussions, necessarily opposed in their general direction, to the forces of unthinking.

I taught, as I think I have already mentioned, a LINK course this quarter.  These link courses seem like a good idea, but the one I taught this quarter was a bust.  All of the students in my basic, first year, writing course were enrolled in the same GE course, Sociology one.  I think, going in, this might be fun.

But when I emailed the instructor for the course last quarter, a couple of times, to get an idea of what might be on the syllabus, I didn’t hear back.  Then I emailed again two weeks before the class was to start and still I didn’t hear back.  So I didn’t get a syllabus for the class until the first day of class, just as the students did.

I am pretty quick on my feet and I thought I could figure it out.  I would put materials up on the web; some I had already scanned in for web access and I figured I would find other material on the web or I would scan in more stuff.  So it should be OK, but then I saw that the midterm and final for the course were both multiple choice. 

My previous links have proved most useful when linked to courses that required written midterms and finals.  Usually the instructor hands out the questions ahead of time and then we practice analyzing them in class and getting a handle on what the instructor might be looking for.  Usually also such courses have a short paper on one or two topics usually due in the 8^th week or something like that.  But the instructor for this course had divided the paper for the class, a 10 pager, into three parts.  The different parts were to be handed in at different times and sort of all patched together for the final paper.

I could find no way to work with this format.  I couldn’t even figure when to schedule a class or part of a class to talk about the papers because the students were getting directions from their TAs in sections that stretched from Monday to Friday and I taught on Tuesday and Thursday, so what I might say might be fresh for one student and a boring repeat for another.  And a little in class discussion indicated students were getting different advice from the different TAs about what they were supposed to be doing exactly for the paper.  I didn’t see what I could say about it without contradicting something somebody had said or in general muddling up the picture.

I suppose the students might have liked it a bit had I gone over note taking and things like that and had some reviews based on their notes.  But frankly, it seemed to me that the instructor was ladling out the material in perfect spoon sized bites and if students didn’t get it they simply had forgotten to swallow.  I call it the sardines in a can coverage model.  You divide up the whole of sociology into ten sections, ideally convenient for a ten week course, and then you produce a list of info bits for each lecture.  Additionally, the instructor but the outlines for the lectures online at the end of the week, and the textbook for the course had a website with all sorts of handy little study questions. 

So the course just slipped away from me.  And I know it was a bust partly because I had the misfortune to hear a couple of students in my writing class talking to students who had not been in and saying that my class had been a “waste of time.”  Damn!

I hate this stinking room.  It’s one of the rooms in the new humanities building.  Actually, it’s not that new, over 10 years old.  I hate all the rooms in this building and this one is worse than the others.

Look at that roof.  It’s way too low.  The room is too small and the roof is too low.  It’s impossible to do group work because the overlapping noise from one group interferes with the noise from another.  It’s even hard to get students to sit in a semi-circle or circle because you can’t cram all the seats—if you have twenty five students—into a circle.

Actually, I don’t have students sit in a circle much anymore because I am trying to integrate a laptop into my teaching.  This room does have a digital projector in it.  That means I can bring in my laptop (which I bought with my own good money expressly for teaching purposes), hook it up, and access the web.  I have the syllabuses for my classes up on the web and I sometimes have links to readings or images or other things for the purposes of discussion.

But the web hookup in this room works properly only half the time.  The connection is bad.  I spent the first three weeks of this last quarter in this room trying to get the connection to work.  I would start the computer and then for some reason it wouldn’t connect with the digital projector.  Then I got the digital projector working but the internet wouldn’t work except sporadically.  Finally, the outlet was fixed and once I replaced all of the cables I started with I got the damn thing to work.

But to work the lap top I have to sit way off at the right end of those tables because my cables aren’t very long and I have to sit close to that white box back there on the wall or I can’t make them reach and be sure that the pressure of the weight of the cords stretched out over space won’t make them fall out of their connections. 

So there I am stuck way off to the right trying to make my laptop work and sort of talk caty-corner across the room.  And as you will note, the front row seats are too close to the seat I sit in at the end of the table.  If students actually sit in one of those seats, I practically spit on them if they say something and I try to say something back.  If I try to say something back and I don’t spit on the student, people in the back row won’t hear me.

I just feel claustrophobic in that room and I never teach well in it.  I have a theory that if a teacher is to be effective, students must be able to idealize the teacher just a little bit and see him or her at least as a tad stronger or more intelligent or witty than he or she really is.  But idealization takes a little distance, just as romance requires low light.  It’s hard to idealize the teacher when you can see the big pores on his nose or the hairs growing out of the nostrils.

One of my students wanted to talk to me after class because he is taking a course called, “Introduction to the University,” and they had given him the assignment of speaking to a faculty or staff person somewhere on campus.

He’s an Asian kid with a big head of hair; and of course he is in the sciences.

He asked what the most difficult part of my job was.  I thought about it for a second and said, “I don’t know if I am succeeding.  I want my students to learn something, preferably about writing and how to do it, but I don’t know sometimes at the end of a quarter if I have managed to do anything but move a pile of sand from one place to another, both equally random.”

I didn’t say that exactly.  But with writing I do think it hard to measure “improvement” or even precisely to define what “improvement” might be.  I think one can detect improvement if one defines it in limited ways.  At one time, many years ago, like more than 25, I came up with the bright idea that the key to improving writing was to have students learn transitional words and phrases.  So I worked at that with some diligence the whole quarter.

 And I suppose I could say that their use of transitions improved.  By the end of the quarter, they were certainly using more of them.  But honestly, overall, I couldn’t say their writing had improved.  Some just seemed to throw in more transitions whether necessary or not, and others seemed actually to craft their whole sentence around the need to include a transition.  I suppose I had succeeded; certainly students were more aware of the existence of transitions, but I couldn’t say as a result of this increased awareness that the papers were more organized than they ever had been.

So yes, that’s the hardest part.  Grading papers, marking them all up, without knowing if students read what you have written, and if they have read, if they understand anything said, and if they understand anything said, if they understood correctly, and if they have understood correctly what message they might derive from that—about themselves as people who write.  After all, my class usually is just the first in a line of courses that will require writing and which might, willy-nilly, produce improvement.

Sometimes I think the best thing I can do, given all the writing that will come after, is simply to make sure I don’t completely paralyze some poor students, actually retard their writing development by saying or writing something they take to indicate that as writers they are hopeless basket cases.  But I don’t know even if I manage to avoid doing that.

That report by a professor at SDSU saying that today's college students are the most narcissistic since the Narcissistic Personality Profile was first done to groups of college kids is generating some press. I have already mentioned this report on this blog.

I have a writing class linked with a sociology course, so for their final writing unit I am having them read some material on the changing American family.

I decided to try to spice things up a bit by having them read some of the news reports saying they are the most narcissistic generation ever.

Thusly:

A recent report that's getting some press says that students in college today are more narcissistic than at any time since 1982 (when the Narcissistic Personality Inventory was first used in great numbers). This means that students today are more self-centered than ever before. Moreover, because of their inflated sense of self importance, they are more prone than previous students to be depressed and/or rageful at perceived slights or insults no matter how small or insignificant. Additionally, since the narcissist is primary self-involved he or she may have more difficulty sustaining long term relations with depth.

This is not a pretty perfect, or at least people don't seem to be going around saying, Yipee! Our kids are more narcissistic than ever. And who is to blame for this new generation. The usual suspects of course: parents, schools and technology.

Utube and My Space seem particularly to play into the narcissistic urge. What is MySpace but a place to say, Hey look at me. See how cute I am and how cute my friends are. Look at the cute places we go and travel. We are even cute when were drunk. Damn but we are cute. Look at me. See how many "friends" I have, hundreds and hundreds most of whom I have never met. But they think I am cute, so that's enough.

Schools, well, of course they do nothing but fail. They have been taken over by the self-esteem movement. Teachers have little kids sing an I am a special person song, and they try not to hurt kids self-esteem. That's one reason we have grade inflation; the teachers don't want to hurt the kids sensitive feelings.

And parents--well the parents of these kids were themselves, in their day labeled narcissistic, so what can you expect. They went around responding to their kids every whim like they were kings or queens or something. And they told their kids they were special and that they could do just about anything they wanted.

Here we are not dealing with poverty or drugs or suicide that is usually attributed to the failing family but with just plain old miserable self-centeredness found among children of the middle and upper middle class.

Now, if we step back and take a look at this name calling, we can see right off that the argument here is a moral argument; the fancy word narcissism is used to describe simple selfishness and self-centeredness among the young. And the supposed cure to the problem is the old conservative cure to moral problems. Get rid of the offending materials. And, above all else, we need more discipline.

What would be a more sociological explanation for this increase in narcissism. Well, remember sociologists like to link individual behavior to broader trends. I think we can say that, if young people today are more narcissistic, that's because society as a whole for the last 25 years at least, largely under the control of the Republican party, has backed away from programs that support the public good. Fewer roads are built and repaired, fewer schools are built and repaired. The poor moreover are left to languish visibly at the bottom of the heap. If I am a middle class kid going to school today, I might want to think that I was special. That might explain at least why I have so much and others don't. I am special and they aren't. I mean if I have so much and I am not special, then there's no reason at all that I have so much and poor people my own age have so little.