E Pluribus Trivium

I wrapped up Scholes' Rise and Fall on Monday morning while I was waiting in the auto shop.  Since then, I've been reconsidering it from a distance--the full displacement brought on by a hearty paper load, full-time work, and other important stuff-o-life.  I keep coming back to a few basic ideas set up by Scholes in chapter four, "A Flock of Cultures."  Throughout, Scholes uses a split chapter system, so, for example, chapter four has a postlude called "assignment four" in which he details--in practical terms--an application of much of the theorizing he summons in the early portion of the chapter.  Before the "assignment" section, he proposes a design  for a general education curriculum parsed into grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Scholes introduces this threesome under the heading, "A Trivial Proposal."  He's having fun with the connotations of "trivial," enlisting it as something of lesser consequence (than the Western Civilization and Great Books canonical approaches) and also as a modern resurrection of the medieval model for foundational education--the basis preceding advanced scholarship in "arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music." He explains the subtle differences between each of the course-types.  For grammar, a course called "Language and Human Subjectivity" would comb over pronoun usage and alienation in language structures.  A second grammar course would concern "Representation and Objectivity."  Anthropological perspective, ethnography, the objective discourses pervasive in the observational sciences: these would be done up in this second grammar course.  For rhetoric, he suggests a course on "Persuasion and Mediation," which "would obviously include the traditional arts of manipulation of audiences but would also point toward the capacities and limits of the newer media, especially those that mix verbal and visual textuality to generate effects of unprecedented power" (125).  To round this one out--and because Scholes spends relatively little time on it--I would toss in technology. 

Til now, I've summarized Scholes, little more.  I still have to wrestle with his course concerning dialectic. He dubs the course "System and Dialetcic."  The purpose is philosophical grounding, critical positioning, reason and logic, historical antecedents, and leverage in rich, complex, and intertwined discursive legacies.  Good enough.  But this brings me back to something Scholes writes about Hegel earlier in the chapter, and it brings me back with a sense of  thin (okay, nano-thin, but even nanotechnology can achieve conduction.) connection to parts of what Collin wrote the other day, especially on deference to "the field" or "the discipline" of Composition Studies.  From Scholes: 

As I have already partly indicated, I believe that our tendency to speak in terms of Western Civ is derived from the degeneration of Hegelian ideas into the repertory of "common sense." I call this a degeneration because, in this passage from systematic thought to folk wisdom, Hegel's ideas have been separated from the rationale that drove them.  By putting them back in their Hegelian context, I hope to show both what they have lost in this transition and how we shall have to adapt and modify them to make them useful again for curricular purposes.  Let me begin this complex process by pointing out that for Hegel the idea of studying the West without the East would be ludicrous.  The basic principle involved here is Hegel's view of history as a dialectical process, in which the new always results from the negation and sublation of the old, in which certain elements of the old are retained within the new synthesis.  By seeing the West as the dialectical heir to the East, Hegel incorporates understanding of the East as a necessary part of the study of Germanic (or Western) culture. (114)

From here, I don't want to ratchet into too-tight conclusions; this is a tentative think-through--one that I hope carries over into more questions for other days.  It's just that "negation and sublation" are variously deliberate (active) and inadvertent (passive), but they're paramount to the dialectic process of forward-moving transformations informed by history. Taken another way, I suppose we could call them corrosive to our sense of shared values (about best practices, say), of a social network, or to the field or the discipline, set apart by "its own momentum and character as an organization."  I've typed right up to a crossroads here--one that I know needs more deliberation, more consideration.  It's just that Scholes is whispering "dialectic," as I'm reading Milgram, reading "agentic shift."  Scholes is winking me back to this passage on Hegel (which rings of authority, canon, discipline, globalism), and I'm trying to play along, sputtering at times, but trusting that this will come together, that a refined understanding will come about from this search.  And maybe Scholes is there because, in proximal terms, he was there most recently--Monday--as I read and waited for the oil change.  Will he still be there tomorrow?  Will Hegel?  Will the East?  Abstraction and shift, abstraction and shift.  To what end?

A few more quick notes on Scholes and his curricular trivium.  I like many things about it, and I see ways that much of it is already taking good form in the FY sequence, upper division WI courses, and interdisciplinary parternships.  The model left me with questions about how composition already marries the trivium into a single course.  All three parts, in effect, share writing.  Or writing shares them.  Either way, the composition classroom is where all of this is going on at once, yes?  The other angle of my critique of Scholes--and I noted it earlier--is the rather buried issue of technology in his plan. 

Postied by at 11:02 PM | to Dry Ogre Chalking

Friday, March 5, 2004

Math is dead.  Long live math.

F riday evening.  Lugging the end-of-term grading load has rendered me too tired to report on the first fifty pages of Milgram's Obedience to Authority.  I picked up a dusty copy from the library shelf yesterday morning after class.  Found time to read some over coffee this morning.  Collin's entry is helping me think about agentic shift from several different angles. More on that sometime this weekend, I hope.

For now, I just want to share a comment Ph. made when he got home this afternoon.  He and I have been spending late afternoons before D. gets home from student-teaching, working on math.  The latest feat: drilling through multiplying and dividing mixed fractions.  So today he mentioned that they've started a new section--repeating decimals.  He summarized the lesson: "you just put a line over the number to show that it keeps going forever."

Forever?  Wha?!  We traded one of our usual banters where I act surprised by something taught in the school.  It's not a serious, deep, or undercutting skepticism (usually); it's more of a game meant to tease out the lessons, to reinforce the in-school learning.  So I asked him what forever means in mathematical terms.  "If you couldn't use the overline to show that it goes forever, when would it end?  It can't really go on endlessly, can it?"

Ph.: Probably not.
Me: So when do you think a repeating decimal ends?
Ph.:  When math is dead, I guess.
Me:  *nothing to say...long pause*  That's an answer I won't argue against.

Postied by at 6:55 PM | to Ground Swell

Thursday, March 4, 2004

Free Kick on Zeno's Field, or It Doesn't Matter Who's Tending Goal

[Another soundtrack audio-blaring: O Brother, Where Art Thou?]

It occurs to me as I set out to key this entry that some things don't belong here at EWM, some things should be off the edge of this weblog in a less public space.  How will I know when I've crossed the line--fumbled in poor taste by revealing something inappropriate?  Dunno.  Dunno.  I'll listen for the uncomfortable silence then.

About work: another busy week.  Eighth of eight in spring I online courses, which means a heaping inflow of student writing from the accelerated term is jamming my email box--but like coldstiff milkshakes to a small straw, this too shall pass.  Ease will be restored.  Next week is spring break.  

I've been talking about sports during the day; it's one of my jobs to keep two fingers on the pulse.  Latest:  there's talk of a formal violation of the NAIA Coaches Code.  Specifically this:

I will ever keep before the students under my direction the high ideals, honesty, sincerity, and integrity which have made our nation great. I will not encourage, or ever tolerate, any form of trickery or evasion of rules in order to gain an advantage over an opponent.

Broken.  Rules are rules!  I've been reading the coaches code, smiling quietly to myself at their morph and moralizing, but taking very seriously that someone can formally allege a breach of this code.  I shouldn't disclose more details yet, but I can say that I find the language in the code surprising.  Why?  Well, coaching is premised on gaining an advantage over an opponent.  I've witnessed plenty of instances of coaches encouraging the "evasion of rules in order to gain an advantage over an opponent."  This happens every time a coach argues with a referee about a call, and since it's so purely interpretive, so purely perceptual, it's a system rife with manipulations and stunts. And the part about "made our nation great"?  Did I mention that the NAIA includes a few Canadian institutions?  Wild, indeed.

---

Stampede, the seventh grade basketball club I coach, is near its dissolution.  The season has tapered to a close for the Blue Team; the Green Team has two games left.  Around here, the kids join their school teams in eighth grade, so my work is almost complete.  I've been booking my winters solid with coaching this group for the last four years; it's a relief that it's coming to an end. I've grown to disdain the spectacle and pressure asserted on the whole scene.  Club basketball is cut-throat.  I don't want to preach on this issue, but I keep coming back to a simple perspective about learning and development:  free play.  In other words, the sporting arena for these kids has been pressurized, conditioned into an ultra-formal site where ritual, uniformity and spectacle squelch fun and accidental passions for playing. Makes me think of spoilation and loss in Percian terms.  IMHO, twelve-year-old kids who don't have their bodies yet (do we ever?!) should not be cut from a sport. Period.

My boss, C., and I had a chat the other day about the erosion of sports programs in public school systems.  Around here, many high school students are choosing to compete for clubs outside the school system.  The clubs, it turns out, aren't confined by state high school athletic associations.  They're freer to play more contests year round, and many parents see it as a ticket to a more promising athletic future.  In Johnson County, Kan., where he lives, he's watched soccer fields spring up en masse.  He talked about the more than two thousand soccer players whose families choke roadways carpooling to the fields each weekend.  The traffic has been picking up for the twelve years he's lived near the fields.  Olathe and Overland Park are regionally known for premier soccer clubs.  But the scale--funding, transportation, paid coaches, etc.--seems to instill a sense of entitlement in athletes at a younger age.  Does it really elevate the level of play? To what end? Are well-funded, private, suburban sports clubs turning out high quality athletes?  Anyway, that was the premise our talk.  C., a former NBAer who's been coaching for 25 years, suggested we'll see more and more public schools turning to pay-to-play arrangements (which exploit economic gaps and proliferate spirits of entitlement) or, worse(?), dropping sports programs altogether.    

Postied by at 7:31 PM | to Sport

Wednesday, March 3, 2004

Agentic Shift

*clicking persistently, feverishly because this stupid computer is so slow*

Not really. That was one example of Milgram's "agentic shift" from class yesterday. It was one of the more interesting sessions we've had this semester. I referred students to chunks of Postman's chapter on "The Ideology of Machines: Computer Technology." They collaborated to generate questions for their chunk, which, after fifteen or so minutes, was passed into the hands of the next group who took up the work of mustering a response. A rich discussion spun out of this simple arrangement: "computer" as it referred to a person who computes (pre-1940), voice bots and sometimes-undetectable artificial intelligence, the technopolist ideology that relishes human-as-machines models of efficiency, generally subscribing to the view that we are at our best when we are most functionally productive (no excess) and refined in our acts (without waste or deviation).

I'm still trying to get a grip on the idea of "agentic shift." I haven't read Milgram's Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974). So it's only a best guess that agentic shift is a rhetorical event. Is it more than displaced agency? Shirked responsibility? Does it flourish in the technological high tide?

I'm wondering about this especially as it seems to relate to video gaming. I want to be careful what I say because I'm not up on the latest buzz in video game studies--only know that they're here. But if agentic shift is, as Postman calls it (acknowledging Milgram), the name of the process "whereby humans transfer responsibility for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent," then video gaming, and maybe all encounters with technical machinery, fit. So maybe it's possible to have a group agentic shift (a collective of transference?), in which the group *thinking social software here* transfers responsibility to an abstract agent-authority: the software. Is this too much of a reach from Milgram's Yale experiments or does this simply affirm--in a modern context--what Milgram proved forty years ago?

Postied by at 5:40 PM | to Dry Ogre Chalking

Monday, March 1, 2004

One Fell Off and Bumped His Head

I n a coffee shop this morning, I waited patiently while the Fordists (hey, it's a Ford, where else am I going to take it) tapped and prodded my vehicle, changing out the oil and detailing it through a DMV inspection. Need to renew the tags, and someone with authority and license has to sign the paper affirming everything (except the driver) is road safe. Torn wiper blades and a burnt-out tail light. WTF! You'd be sick on my behalf if I told you how much they charged. I had to have the inspection--today.

But I was at a coffee shop walking distance from the car shop. I was sipping on some exotic, way-too-strong coffee. You know the kind that's so potent it makes your tongue feel dry? That's the kind of coffee I was drinking. Empty place, since it's Monday morning, eight o'clock. I was reading Scholes. Chapter four: A Flock of Cultures. All about the etymology of canon and Hegel's brand of history and problems with Great Books and conceptions of Western Civilization. It turns to suggestions for curricular design, and I've been meaning all day to write about it, to expand the few notes I scribbled down. Maybe tomorrow.

It was an empty place, but a dad and his young daughter (guessing at the relationships) took seats at the table next to me. The girl was two-ish, chiming through songs (like the one about a crowd of monkeys jumping on the bed--see entry title). The dad was fumbling with a huge brownie (breakfast?), dividing it into adult and child-sized portions. Now that I'm writing this, I can't remember exactly why I thought this was relevant to Scholes, to my day, the oil change, or you.

So I think it was the daughter's sense of unfairness in the brownie apportionment. She was really young, but she knew immediately that her dad was eating the bigger piece of the brownie. She kept asking him, "Da, why you eating da big one?" And he tried to answer, "Because I'm hungry." And she asked again. He tried a different answer, "Because it is yummy." She kept asking. Geez. So I was eavesdropping, but they were only four feet away, and I was still reading Scholes with most of my attention. Her curiosity was incredibly persistent, and it became more emphatic on the word "big." "Da, why you eating da big one?" He didn't say, "Because I'm big, too." You know, spatial relationships, proximity, size: early (and lasting) understandings of social justice.

Postied by at 11:27 PM | to Slouching Toward

"It's futile to hype the values of contemplation on the information-sick"(51). Sirc, Comp as a Happening