scrivel

Fish is at it again, in a third installment of his “What Colleges Should Teach” series. And here is another response:

Once again, Dr. Fish, you ignore the fact that writing — real writing — is always writing *for* and writing *about*. I agreed with your first post’s implication that college writing courses often focus too much on “content”, in the form of literature, or cultural studies, or whatever. I also agree that there were certain excesses associated with the whole “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language” thing, although I would point out that learning a “new language” isn’t a value-neutral exercise. Teaching students to write academically changes them in profound ways.

But I have trouble believing that what you describe here is actually all you do in your writing courses, nor do I believe that if that’s the case, your students are learning anything worthwhile. You have described a setting in which students have no motivation to write, no content to wrestle with, and no audience to persuade or enlighten. You seem to assume that students must first work on *how* to write something, before they can move on to the *what* and *why*. In other words, you have reduced the entire rhetorical situation to stylistic exercises.

I suspect that much of your posturing here is the result of a self-manufactured literacy crisis. That is, I think you have become appalled by what you consider to be student writing that lacks the stylistic niceties you associate with good prose, and you’ve decided that it’s the job of college writing courses to fix the problem. I’m sorry that I can’t oblige you. I’m too busy trying to give my students reasons to write and guiding them toward more and more academic ways of framing their ideas in writing. If you’ll forgive the expression, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

This, I shit you not, is an excerpt from a report on “dignity” from the President’s Council on Bioethics:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

Wow. I mean, wow. I could say how similar this is to a medieval sermon, or lament how these are the same people who advise the president (wrongly) on issues like stem cell research. However, I just think I’ll bask in the sublime absurdity of taking a moral stand on public licking (be careful how you spell that, by the way).

For a discussion of this weirdness, see Steven Pinker’s article in the New Republic.

The Positivity Blog has an interesting post about Why You Should Write Things Down. I like the focus on using writing as a cognitive tool (as opposed to a purely communicative one). I was especially intrigued by this reason for writing things down:

Unloading your mental RAM. When you don´t occupy your mind with having to remember every little thing – like how much milk to get – you become less stressed and it becomes easier to think clearly. This is, in my opinion, one of the most important reasons to write things down. Feeling more calm and relaxed does not only improves your health but also makes life easier.

Reading this reminded me of Plato’s story (in Phaedrus) about King Thamus’ rebuke to Theuth, the Egyptian god who invented writing:

If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.

That Plato cracks me up. Where others saw a useful tool, he saw the road to moral turpitude.

One of my sons recently taught me a lesson about scaffolding. For years now, he’s been riding a bike with training wheels, but this summer we wanted him to learn to ride without them. They’re noisy and cumbersome, and they really slowed him down. So, I encouraged him to ride upright, so that he wasn’t on the training wheels. I was even planning to start raising the wheels, so that he would be less dependent on them. The idea, I guess, was that he’d eventually decide he didn’t need them.

Well, things didn’t work out that way. He kept riding on the training wheels, no matter how much I praised him whenever he wasn’t on them. At around this time, though, I saw a segment on Sesame Street that showed Scandinavian kids (much younger than my son) balancing perfectly well on bicycle-like scooters without pedals. I ran out to the garage, pulled both the training wheels and pedals off his bike, and had him sit-and-scoot up and down the street a few times over the course of a couple of days. After about maybe a total of ten minutes riding this way, I put the pedals back on, and (to my great surprise) he was immediately riding on his own. (more…)

I finally got up to the library here, to set up my account, and discovered that the library doesn’t have any service for paging books or delivering books through campus mail. A snotty librarian lurking behind the circulation desk cast a derisive smirk at the very idea that a university library would send books to patrons.

I’m not sure I deserved that smirk. I think that, from her point of view, I’m just too lazy to get my own books out of the stacks. But I’ve been at two universities now (one of them belonging to the same larger state univ. system) that delivered books–free of charge–to both faculty and graduate students. I always figured that those schools saw such a service as a way to support research and scholarship–not to mention all the possible work-study funding for undergrads.

Maybe those other places spoiled me. The thing is, I don’t particularly mind getting my own books, even though time in the stacks is not especially productive. It just seems, well, not as supportive as I’m used to.

I’m curious what other folks’ libraries do. Is it unusual for libraries to deliver books to faculty and/or grad students?