I don't want to drag us from moving forward with ideas, but all this structuralist and post-structuralist talk is, while interesting for me The Writer (says me), highly problematic, or seemingly so, as a teacher.
It might help to understand how I teach, or my main 'ethic', if there is one. I instruct Basic Skills and Composition. But that isn't really what I teach or what I see myself as teaching. Those were terrible classes to take, I wouldn't do that to someone else. In my version, it is more or less a combination of critical ethics, critical thinking, and critical and personal writing. You can't write well without thinking well or speaking well or vice versa, so the whole English 1A...B...C cycle is silly, inmho.
Anyway, one of the first things we talk about is the sentence. Subject, predicate, right? Usually a couple people get that. But I ask again. Ok. Noun, verb. And maybe a couple more people get that. And what is that? Things doing. There is your basic sentence, the one you see everywhere or hear people talking about: things doing. Everything else is just a build off of that, right?
Well, not exactly. I mean, not for practical purposes anyway. When you think about it, all communication is someone telling someone else something. It is about people over here telling people over there. But what? Things doing? Not really. I mean, yeah: if you write botany papers, ok. But the overwhelming majority of what we say, tell, read, communicate, isn't about things doing at all. It is about us. People.
Someone is always doing (something to someone for some ends and to some effect). Even if it isn't in any one sentence, it is there. A good reader finds out. A good writer just shares in the first place.
That is the real sentence. But we screw it up. Often with plain 'ol passive voice, refusing to reveal directly the actor of the sentence or to make them the subject. Passive aggressively not holding them accountable. But it gets worse than that. If you look at journalistic writing you especially see this problem. "Deficit talks broke down Friday." Really? Wow, cause I thought people were doing stuff. It is stand in, lazy, passive metaphor, almost innuendo for a supposedly knowing reader. Code: John Boehner stopped talking to the President Friday. And you can go further. The consequence of him doing so is that maybe the large group of mostly men who have the job "congress" attached to their name, won't vote to increase the deficit. But even that needs to be unpacked. The news says: "US about to default on debt if the debt ceiling isn't raised." All like it is in some sort of vacuum. The US nothing. If those dudes do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, which is really about saying they agree to pay for stuff they already bought, then the President believes that he will not be able to tell the Treasury Secretary to keep writing checks and sending them out to creditors, which are groups of people who lent us money in the past. And, so what? Well, other bad things, because then other people, and those people, won't lend money back to us, and really, yes, us. And that means no nothing. No school, no Pell Grants, no Student Loans, no unemployment, no check to grandma, no healthcare. Everything just sorta stops. And why didn't people get that? Cause no one would just say that these people doing this thing will effect these people. Or why. Because that is the republican agenda and that is a longer conversation.
All of this being a long way to get to the ethics part, which comes later, about being autonomous sentient beings either treating other people, in any given moment, as tools toward some end, or as also other sentient beings and thus ends in themselves. I somehow got very Kantian.
Anyway, the writer died is a terrible way to teach. Foucault helps somewhat, but not entirely. I don't just teach this way because I think it works. But it does. These kids don't see themselves as authors, as autonomous. It is why they haven't taken the whole schooling thing seriously. They have been taught to be good little cogs, tools of the system. This is true of the spoiled rich kids in Alabama, the farm kids in Kentucky, the inner city kids in San Francisco and Berkeley, and the suburban kids in Fremont. I want them to see that as insulting and do something about it. Talking about responsibility and autonomy excites them. It works, and I am inclined to believe it is right.
But that is... perhaps too simplistic. It does not seem to mesh with these other ideas about the complexity of the author. Or, god don't let me get started on human systems. Or even, actually, the autonomy of the reader. I hope for it as a happy side effect, but unlike other teachers I have observed, I do not start out emphasizing the reader as such. The way they come in is that if the author doesn't do a good enough job, they have let the reader own their story, which means they can do whatever they like. So, I tell them that the author should own it. The author is.... kinda a dictator. Which seems highly problematic.
I am not at all convinced that these ideas are all mutually exclusive. But they do seem problemizing.
Here is my pre-language, poetic reaction
:(
Going to go read more Freire. For some comfort.
No comments:
Post a Comment