The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland
They are so happy. So cute. So smart. Such KIDS!
Oct 212015
Oct 212015
The Radio Lab podcast was so fascinating that I shared it with half a dozen smart people and talked about it with 2 others.
One of the most compelling ideas in the podcast is that Ildefonso, the focus of the short documentary “A Man without Words”, says he can no longer remember how to ‘think’ the way he did for the first 27 years of his life. I imagine it might be comparable to the way I can’t remember even the most vivid dreams mere moments after awakening. How often are our ideologies and beliefs and memories replaced by new knowledge and experiences? What do we lose when we learn new things?
Curious about what Ildefonso looks like? See the A Man Without Words trailer from Zack Godshall on Vimeo.
Oct 212015
That episode was fantastic. I just sent it to four people. If I had the power I would weave that into the fabric of the curriculum for Lit Theory courses, because that seriously would have helped me pick up on Saussure and Derrida.
For me, the most compelling element of the “Words” episode of the Radiolab podcast is the bit involving the rats. This seems to make the most sense in relation to the idea that language constitutes reality, which is something I’ve always struggled to understand.
The rats can see color. For their purposes, they understand the color blue. And they understand direction. Left. But they can’t seem to connect the two ideas in a way that makes sense of the world around them. Left of blue.
“These different kinds of knowledge can’t talk to each other.”
The inference is that rats don’t have the language required for this kind of internal discussion because children behave in a similar manner until they reach an age where linguistic communication seems to allow for this very connection to take place. Left of blue.
“And those aren’t just words that come out of the child’s mouth… inside the child’s brain, what that phrase does—is link these concepts together.”
I operate under the stance that reality is subjective. Sure, things may exist apart from me, that is to say outside of that which I experience through sensory intake, but I can’t know that. I know that certain things feel objective and stable, but I can’t very well exit myself to find out if those feelings are grounded in something other than a singular subjective reality. I can, however, communicate with myself to try to reason with what it is that I am experiencing as the real—that which feels objective. But, in keeping with the rat study, that cognitive reasoning is based on my ability to use language to make connections between ideas. Without language there is no connection, ergo there is no reality.
Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience seems to complicate this—being removed from the realm of cognitive connection and relegated to immediate, present tense sensory information. The question then becomes, in a state where language is not possible, was she experiencing reality? Or, a bit beyond the discussion of the podcast, did she only experience those events in retrospect once she could effectively communicate her experience?
Oct 202015
I wonder what it must feel like to grow up never knowing or understanding language or what language even is. For one thing, it would be an incredibly lonely existence and I can’t imagine what the 27 year-old man in the podcast went through during his childhood and adulthood.
I had never thought of language as something that wasn’t already there in some way or another, that language was the basis for everything. I figured smaller humans (babies and toddlers) had their own sort of made-up language or something in the brain that worked similarly to language. But now listening to the podcast, my mind is kind of blown.
Listening about the woman who had the stroke, I was amazed by how she spoke of the “inner silence” she experienced after she no longer had a language or any real thoughts. She only was able to experience the current moment, rather than think about the past or future. That little voice wasn’t talking in her ear. She experienced silence for the first time, which I think is something really remarkable yet completely terrifying. Language is something I’m so used to, so I’m not sure how I would feel if it were turned off.
Oct 202015
In listening to the Radiolab episode “A Word Without Words,” I was intrigued by the story of the man who lived 27 years without any concept or use of language. Once he learned to sign, he felt his world take shape. He was finally able to connect his visual and physical perceptions of reality with an inner dialogue, which gave the world significance. He began to form ideas.
The power of words in shaping perception is fascinating. It speaks to the power of stories – that an idea or a memory doesn’t exist until we can put it into a language. Margaret Atwood has a beautiful quote about this concept:
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
Radiolab’s episode, “Colors,” also speaks to words’ ability to shape perception. There’s no evidence to suggest that humans could see the color blue before 4,500 years ago. Homer uses many colors in The Odyssey, but never blue. He says the sea is “wine-dark.” When analyzing ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew texts, the color blue isn’t mentioned. And since the sky is one of the only natural occurrences of blue, it’s natural that no one came up with a word for it. It just wasn’t necessary. So while people could see the color, they didn’t notice it because they didn’t have the right word.
Words shape our realities on a primal level, which means learning happens through the writing process. This makes a strong case for teaching persuasive writing over informative – students discover ideas through writing, provided they’re interested in their topic.
Oct 162015
In our first reading, Elbow notes that an audience can act as a beneficial or detrimental force. He goes on to state how the idea of an audience often acts as a disruptive force, making the production of an essay difficult for FYC students. I believe this is the case for many of my students. My students are so concerned about “sounding academic” that their writing obscures their meaning or prevents them from discovering new meaning. I understand what they are attempting to do. They are trying to place themselves in the discourse (and, of course, get full points on the audience portion of the grading rubric). But in their flurry of ten-dollar words and complex sentence structures, I am left confused and somewhat frustrated.
After one a round of particularly dreadful rough drafts, I tried a freewriting activity in class. My directions were simple: take out a sheet of paper and pen and write for 15 minutes without stopping. Do not pause. Do not erase. Do not revise. Just write and see where it takes you, what ideas it generates. I set them on their task. They seemed confused when I told them that this assignment would not be collected.
I could sense their hesitancy as they wrote, struggling to keep their pen moving and their ideas flowing. Besides the fact that they were burnt out on the topic of technology, they struggled to ignore audience. Perhaps this struggle will persist as most of their writing occurs in a classroom setting. So, of course, they construct these pieces of work knowing that they will be seen, commented on, and graded. Can they learn to ignore audience (at least in the beginning stages of writing)? And if they did, would their writing be different/better as a result? What would my students’ papers look like if they knew I would not see them?
Despite the activity’s mixed success, I plan to use more freewriting activities. I’ll update with any promising developments.
Oct 162015
Peter Elbow talks about private language as a way in which children can “[build] sandcastles or draw pictures” (58), either for themselves or to be shown to others. The relation between these two ideas, private work versus public work, seems to be extremely important. While many of my students are used to writing for a grade, few of them seem to actually write to develop or express ideas. In many of my students papers, they seem to be unwilling to take the risk of letting me view their “experience[s] and material[s]” (57).
I believe this to be because, while getting a low grade is unpleasant, getting a “subpar” grade on something that you care about is truly painful. There is a difference between getting an “F” on a generic paper about technology and getting an “F” on a paper dealing with something you truly love. However, because there is nothing of themselves in the paper, or because they honestly don’t believe what it is that they’re writing, the generic technology paper lacks purpose.
Instead of trying to convince their reader, they present information in a way that, while technically completing the task, makes me wonder: “What the hell is the point of this?!”
The worst attempts happen when it is obvious that the student doesn’t even believe what he/she is writing. As they are unable to “initiate” the argument, they are forced to “reply” to general classroom discussions instead of focusing on how to develop and “sustain” (57) their argument. When this happens, but I am able to see tiny glimpses of the student’s inner-feelings peeking through generic support, I want to hurl my laptop across my room. It shows that there is something there. It acknowledges the fact that the student is not hopeless. However, it shows the problem that comes with the teacher-student power dynamic.
The student is scared of me. I am not a friend. I am the enemy. I offer nothing except big words meant to confuse. I offer crushed dreams. So instead of presenting themselves to me, they present what they believe it is that I want to see.
Damn it, all I want to see is an essay that contains a hint of who they are. And a Works Cited page.
I may have to settle for only the Works Cited page.
Oct 162015
I found Elbow’s discussion of the “is this okay?” writing to be an interesting problem that I am starting to face in my class. I think, because it was my experience as an undergraduate, that at some point during college, students learn how to insert themselves into the critical conversations of readings and turn into the “listen to me” academic that Elbow mentions. The way I see this problem, however, is not that students are afraid or unable to see themselves as worthy of asserting control over their writing, it is that they have literally been trained during secondary education to never think this way. I think the mindset of secondary ed, due to standardization issues, is that students think they need to do what the teacher (or standardized test essay graders) wants from them, and there is a magical, true and perfect answer to the writings they do in school.
In the Responses article, Bartholomae claims that we need to allow students to consider why they made certain decisions regarding a source, and this will allow them to claim their own writing as a part of an academic conversation. I don’t agree with Bartholomae on this point, because usually, students are only choosing certain quotes because they seem to fit the ideas that they hope make sense in their paper. This is the problem I am facing with the current essay the students are writing. With only one source, Epstein, who essentially writes the answer to the prompt they are given, it will be impossible for students to insert themselves into conversation with her. Students will be forced to develop the most easily supported thesis, not the one that they actually believe or want to teach others about. Thus, they are forced into the “is this okay?” situation because of the restrictive prompt and forced into the same controlling situation that their secondary education created.
Oct 162015
In his conclusion to “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow,” Bartholomae is reluctant to formally conclude his argument, because his conversation with Elbow continues. This got me thinking about the open-endedness of the idea of discussion and dialogue, and how this open-endedness is perhaps antithetical to the idea of writing a conclusion-driven argumentative paper. If we are encouraging students to recognize their place in the conversation—that is, to situate themselves “in time” and “inside a practice” (65)—then how can we ask them to, in a way, conclude that conversation with their own, albeit hopefully thoughtful, argument? Our interest in well-considered thesis statements does not necessarily have to suggest this, of course, but for many of my students the idea that they are suggesting something potentially useful in an effort to merely join in the dialogue is completely foreign to their already developed sense of the “purpose” of writing. I am constantly reminding my students to avoid absolutes, to think critically, to avoid reducing issues to an either/or, black/white dichotomy; this is because I see real use for this skills in the “real world”, and not just while composing a piece of academic writing. But this focus I think at times confuses the issue. What am I asking them to do, if not to conclude something? And if they vacillate between two sides of an issue, claiming both are correct (a good practice) I tell them they must find an argument, a stance, a debatable position from which to operate. To most of my students, these two positions are contradictory. Just like Bartholomae is reluctant to conclude while his discussion is ongoing, my students find themselves reluctant to conclude in a misguided effort to avoid absolutism. I’m not sure how to demonstrate to them the usefulness of the thesis-guided essay in a way that helps them see themselves as part of the dialogue.
Oct 162015
The rhetorical approach, if I have this right, must take into account the audience. That’s kind of imbedded, right? So what to make of the correlation between the rhetorical approach and an approach that, right out of the gate, speaks to “an instinctive attempt to blot out awareness of audience”?
I think it’s fair to say that the title of Elbow’s piece, “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience,” is more bark than bite. By this I mean that his essay does quite a bit to reinforce the rhetorical approach to student, professional, and academic writing, mainly in terms of revision—an element I probably latched onto simply because it is a practice with which I have plenty of experience.
“In short, ignoring audience can lead to worse drafts but better revisions.”
I would argue that the act of revision is, among other things, the act of becoming and, as a result, paying attention to audience. Elbow goes on in the section he titles “A More Ambitious Claim”
“To celebrate writer-based prose is to risk the charge of romanticism: just warbling one’s woodnotes wild. But my position also contains the austere classic view that we must nevertheless revise with conscious awareness of audience…”
Is revision not part of the argumentative process? If what we’re talking about is composition, then we must consider the revision process an element of the writing process, as a part of the composition whole. If a part of the whole includes attention to audience, then I would argue that Elbow’s approach engages with the rhetorical approach, at a bare minimum, in its attention to the revision process, even if the audience for revision purposes remains the writer as self. In terms of technique, the approach seems very much the same.