Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Elbow has my back: In defense of metaphor

I have been for awhile now trying to figure out how to tightrope walk the corpus callosum. I guess that doesn't quite work as a metaphor. What I've been thinking about really is how to balance between the creative and critical impulses. Not an original thought, I know, but one that has particular resonance for me with my combo mathematics/English background and as an MFA-type teaching expository writing. In particular, how does creativity fit into the critical thinking line-item that appears on so many sets of course objectives (with the accompanying quick-draw question of whether and how it/they can best be taught)? And, wrt my own writing and thinking about writing, why is it that for all my efforts to read the scholarly abstractions of comp theory I'm such a sucker for the frivolous and simple-minded metaphor (a term I use here in its broadest possible sense)?

Peter Elbow (yes, him again), in his dialogue with Wayne C. Booth "The Limits and Alternatives to Skepticism" (College English 67 (2005)), offers an interesting formulation, "link[ing] the term critical thinking with the doubting game" and describing the believing game as follows:

What are the linguistic or rhetorical practices that help us dwell in a view or assent or believe? Story, narrative, and poetry help with experiencing. Metaphor and image making also help. When students have trouble entering into a new point of view (perhaps even just understanding it), I find it useful to ask them to harness language in ways like this: tell a story of someone who believes it; imagine and describe someone who sees things this way; tell the story of events that might have led people to have this view of the world; what would it be like to be someone who sees things this way? Write a story or poem about the world that this view implies. where doubting thrives on logic, assent or believing thrives on the imagination and the ability to experience.

In Elbow's view, the imaginative powers of many individuals create an array of diverse views; the communal attempt to believe each of these minority perspectives has tremendous power to test and correct and complicate the majority view, as well as individual positions. (The diversity of the community college population would seem to be a great advantage with this pedagogical approach.)

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On juggling

In addition to constructing short stories, scanning poetry, and diagramming sentences in the idiosyncratic method of dept grammar guru Claude Faulkner, one of the more demonstrable skills I learned in graduate school was juggling (and for a change, this time, I am not speaking in metaphors...not yet anyway). A poet-friend of mine taught me, and the two of us taught several others in the dept, so that some days, instead of lounging in our offices waiting for those students who never showed up, we'd stretch out in the hallway and practice a few tricks, the poets sometimes adding in a soundtrack of some cadenced verse to help their rhythm. (It was one of times of graduate-school-selfconsciousness where I thought we were the poem, or were at least participating in some deeply symbolic experience that one of my friends would, several weeks later, digest and regurgitate into a workshop-ready bit of free verse.) The teaching method we used was quite simple: first, start with two balls in one hand; with the other hand behind yr back, toss ball 1 vertically into the air; when it reaches the height of its arc, toss up ball 2 slightly to the side of ball 1's trajectory, then catch the ball 1 coming down; when ball 2 reaches the top of its arc, toss up ball 1 again. This is the crucial step, the second release of ball 1; once the student masters this, he/she has internalized somehow the necessary rhythm. The rest is practice (sound familiar?). (I practiced for hours with potatoes and balls of socks, until I bought my own set of lacrosse balls, orange and heavy enough for a good degree of stability.) The transition to three balls in two hands was just an extension, shifting the ball trajectory from vertical to gentle arc between yr two hands, timing yr throws to coincide with the apogee of the previous ball's orbit.

The one-sentence argument

Politics aside, isn't this a splendid one-sentence argument (Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2004):

The Republicans are here. We—we New Yorkers—hope they enjoy the amenities of our city. We hope they are treated politely by all of our fellow canyon dwellers, including those among us who are alarmed by the performance of the incumbent Administration during the past three and a half years—alarmed by its mania for shovelling cash to the very rich at the expense of families of middling means, its servility to polluters and fossil-fuel extractors, its reckless embrace of fiscal insolvency, its hostility to science, its political alliances with fanatic religious fundamentalisms of every stripe except Islamic (and of that stripe, too, when the subject is family planning or capital punishment), its partisan exploitation of our city's suffering after the attacks of September 11, 2001, its transubstantiation of the worldwide solidarity that followed those attacks into worldwide anti-Americanism, and its diversion of American blood, treasure, and expertise away from the pursuit of Al Qaeda to a bloody occupation of Iraq that appears to have done nothing to weaken Islamic terrorism and may have done more than a little to strengthen it.

Sequence in the composition class

I'm in an especially expansive Grand-Scheme-of-Things mood these days. The beginning of a semester is always a susceptible time; it's maybe a bit worse this year because I just finished (a draft of) an essay that's been about 20 years in the making, about the phenomenon of hitting the wall academically speaking (or going about as fur as we can go, as the Oklahoma lyrics put it), so I'm in interdisciplinary mode. Maybe that's where composition teachers belong. At any rate, what I've been thinking about is the sequencing of instruction in courses (promising myself I will eventually get around to my own syllabus).

Consider these tried-and-true options:

• The chronological approach. Of course, history classes are the prototype here. Lay out your timeline, chop off your eras, decades, monarchs' reigns or presidents' terms, alternating rhythms of war and peace. Mark off those cataclysmic events: the burning of the library at Alexandria, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Causal chains link the events of history, so this is a logical approach (though other more thematically based structures are possible, I suppose). This approach also show up, for somewhat less compelling reasons, in many literature classes.

Connecting the dots (or not)

In explaining her resistance to a former teacher's criticisms (apparently), one of my students wrote that she didn't want to have to connect the dots for her readers. (Was she concerned for her readers' tedium, or her own? Maybe both.) Sympathetic to her position, I reminded her that it was still her responsibility as a writer to make sure that her dots indeed were connect-able, that there was a recognizable picture there to be discovered. I have been thinking lately about Connect-the-Dots pictures and how they relate to several assignments I've made in the past, the degree to which transitions/connections are necessary or desirable, and the transaction(s) between writer and reader.

Formal thoughts: counterpoint

Shuffling through some web sites the other day (instead of grading essays, no doubt), I found an interesting article, "Forming and Meaning: Writing the Counterpoint Essay" by David W. Chapman. Why do so many students have such difficulty producing good writing using the rhetorical modes approach? Chapman suggests that perhaps the problem is due not to the confines of the standard forms (whether decreed by a teacher or willingly assumed by a student), but rather the scarcity of forms to which the students have been exposed. In particular, he writes about using John McPhee's essay "The Search for Marvin Gardens" as a model for students to write what he terms the "counterpoint essay."

Classification scheming

Even though I'm a little leery of a strict rhetorical approach, I do end up talking in my writing classes about modes of thinking/understanding. This week it was classifying (trailing the procession of gerunds, the ongoing-ness of works-in-progress).

Start with a few models:

• The biological classification system. Linnaeus's grandly ambitious work, really the Ur-classification, is the natural place to start. Take the phylum Chordata and its (fifth grade simplification here) component classes: mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians. (A quick phone call to my zoologist sister might have been in order here to refresh/update my memory; if I recall correctly, the fish situation has grown quite murky over the past few decades.) The intellectual challenge was to isolate the defining characteristics of each class. This is often not a trivial problem. To what degree is is a fur/fin/feathers issue? What about live birth vs. eggs? There's also the question of ensuring that your classification is complete and consistent. Is there one and only one pigeonhole for any new individual that comes strolling along? Can we be sure there are no feathered fish or finned birds?


• The classification of rocks. An issue here, as always, is deciding on a meaningful classification criterion. There are many options to consider: color, chemical composition, hardness. Watch a three-year-old, crouched flat-footed in her driveway, sorting pebbles. Why choose formative process? To what extent can one classify by appearance alone?


• The visible light spectrum. It is possible to classify the continuous. People do it all the time. Is that delightfully skimpy bathing suit of yours red or orange? The difficulties, of course, are at the edges, but theoretically at least boundaries can be set, hash marks etched on the numberline from 400 to 700 nanometers. Indigo starts just here.


• Geometrical classification. When studying triangles, some students jumble their classification criteria, not understanding that a single triangle may be classified (at least) two ways: by side (equilateral, isosceles, scalene) or by angle (obtuse, right, acute). For quadrilaterals the problems compound. Why do we need so many words for shapes with four sides?, the student wails. Will you stop already? Rectangle, trapezoid, square, quadrilateral, parallelogram, kite, rhombus, ridiculous!. It is a laboratory fit for a loony logician. How do those Venn diagrams nest? In which direction do those double-shafted implications point? Which conditions are necessary? Sufficient? Are we entitled to say every or merely some? (Note that these are all important aspects of argumentation.)

Critical thinking, part 3

(First a realization that hit me in the course of thinking over my last entry, an explanation for my mother about why I have chosen to teach writing rather than mathematics: I think that teaching math, at least at the level for which I am qualified, would be for me a stage 2 activity, whereas teaching writing is stage 3, the familiar seductive power of the difficult ...)

Anyway, the task for today: to try to classify the sorts of activities that occur in the mathematics classroom, to see what elements of critical thinking are involved, and to look for parallels and contrasts that might apply, or not, to the teaching of writing.

Critical thinking , part 2

The past few weeks I've been working again on what I've been calling, for about twenty years now, my butterfly essay. In its most recent incarnation the essay deals with the point where learning stops, or at least stops being fun, the Heartbreak Hill of one's scholarly journey. In thinking through what I am trying to say, I've settled for now on a sort of three-part taxonomy (listed below in its mathematical form):

Stage 1. In math ed terms, this is the stage of manipulatives: red and green bean counters, blocks and mosaic pieces, straws bundled together to show place value. In second grade we each had a muslin bag of Cusenaire rods, silky wooden blocks of pure color used to represent the numbers from one to ten. I thought their representation of addition was for simpletons, but I liked to make pyramids with them. When I told my father how much I loved them, he made me a set, roughly cut and painted with muddy-approximate colors. In this stage also I put the miracle of the mobius strip, a link of construction paper chain half-twisted so that even when sliced in half it remained singular, and maybe Napier's bones. This is the stage of magic and delightful appeals to the senses.

Critical thinking, part 1

In an attempt to wean myself from metaphor for a bit (it'll never happen, I'm afraid), I've been trying to wrestle with the notion of critical thinking. The term seems to be bandied about a great deal these days (as a catch-all course objective that belongs on everybody's syllabus, no matter what the discipline), but I am interested in what it means for me, in particular, in a composition class: what core skills I'm talking about, how I try to implement them in my classes, how these thinking skills relate to writing skills (by which I mean, I think, issues relating to sensitivity to language, such as diction, syntax, and style; I KNOW, I KNOW, I can't separate out the two...).