Rhetoric: June 2007 Archive Page

I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they'll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that they leave enough days to cover chapter five and prepare for the final, which is July 16.

Then I left the room.

It was a breath-holding heart-pounding moment, one where I wasn't sure if walking out was the right move. However, I'd done it before and -- truth be told -- I was stood right outside the door, shamelessly eavesdropping. Leaving was the only way I could teach this lesson in strategy and planning because, otherwise, my students would have centered the lesson on me. Is this what you want? Are we right? They would ask with their words and their eyes, watching me for nonverbal cues when I refuse to tell them what to do next. --Miki Louch --Formulating: putting the rubber to the road (Of ferocious tigers and wild strawberries)

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.

[...]

The strongest meshes of the school net are invisible. Constant bidding for a stranger's attention creates a chemistry producing the common characteristics of modern schoolchildren: whining, dishonesty, malice, treachery, cruelty. Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive. The full significance of the classroom as a dramatic environment, as primarily a dramatic environment, has never been properly acknowledged or examined. --John Taylor Gatto --An Angry Look at Modern Schooling: An Enclosure Movement for Children (JohnTaylorGatto.com)

I'm blogging this because of Gatto's willingness to say the emperor has no clothes.

I'm not as disillusioned about public schools as Gatto seems to be, but then I've never tried to fight for reforms. We have instead quietly opted out of the factory-style education system, and we have made lifestyle choices that permit us to live modestly on one salary, in a profession that permits me to have a lot more family time during the summer, so that we can invest the time and energy doing the vitally important job of helping to prepare our children for the world.

"I'm scared, cold, sad, hungry, lonely, thirsty!" -- Carolyn Jerz (age 5)

My daughter should be asleep, but instead she is awake in her room, and has just offered her usual list of reasons for why she desperately needs parental attention at 10:40pm.

This creature was also up at 6:30 this morning.

He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on "mass society" from five or six decades ago.

So let us go, then, you and I -- friends, as we are, of dusty pre-digital cultural literacy -- into the library stacks. Let us locate a bound volume of Sewanee Review from 1957 and open it to read "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture" by Edward Shils. The same text may be found in Shils's collection The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1972 -- a volume not yet absorbed by Google Books. --Scott McLemee --Mass Culture 2.0 (Inside Higher Ed)

A good response to librarian Michael Gorman's latest anti-technology rants.

The best interviews I've had were with people obviously familiar with my work. A great interview with a reporter feels like a natural conversation with a friend you've never met. They'll ask you questions that you haven't answered a hundred times before, and really dive into your experiences that led to something newsworthy. A good interview will feel open ended and go wherever the conversation leads. A good reporter will send you an email when the article is posted and thank you for your time. If you notice any of these qualities, relish the opportunity because these kinds of interviews account for maybe 5% of the interviews I've ever done. --Matt Haughey --How to talk to the press (fortuito.us)

The tips added by Grant Barrett are also helpful.

I'll be teaching an entry-level journalism course this fall, and this will be a helpful way of getting my cub reporters to think about the interview from the perspective of a subject-matter expert.

Negotiators: Ages Nine and Five (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I have a nine-year-old and a five-year-old who love each other to death, but do occasionally bicker. I tend to be far more impatient with the older child, since he is much more capable of finding something else to entertain himself. I generally remind him that, if he wants something that his sister has, he has to offer to trade something else.

If he really, really wants it, he will work fairly hard to get her to agree to a trade. When the argument is more philosophical (such as, he wants to play Harry Potter or Spider Man, and she wants to play her own made-up game "Babies in the Woods") I will pull him aside and tell him to play the game HER way for 20 minutes, after which I will relieve him and he can go do whatever he wants. Sometimes when the 20 minutes has passed, they have found a middle ground that keeps them both happy.

Of course, now that my daughter has heard this conversation too many times, before I actually intervene, I will hear her say things like, "Daddy says you have to do it my way, because I have not yet reached the age of reason."

(See Bickering about LEGOS.)

"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language." --100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin Books)

Hmm... the editors' description of the list is very different from the way it's being marketed. Simply knowing the definition of these words won't suddenly make you more intelligent.

Someone who doesn't know words like "euro" or "suffragist" probably has other important gaps in his or her education. Most citizens probably get through their days without much chance of encountering "moiety" or "ziggurat."

All these words are in my reading vocabulary, but I don't believe I have ever used "abjure" or "abrogate" in a written or spoken sentence, and I wouldn't have been able to explain the difference if I hadn't looked it up just now. Because I never took French, I would never use "gauche" in speech (even though I finally know how to pronounce it, since I just looked it up now), unless perhaps I was creating dialogue for a character who either 1) knew French well enough to be influenced by its vocabulary or 2) wanted people to think that he or she was the kind of cultured person who was used to being around people who dropped French terms. I would have described "jejune" as "immature" or "dull," rather than recognize its Latin root as meaning "meager" or "hungry," or its more technical sense as "lacking nutritious value." I sort of recognized "quotidian" as meaning something like "average" or "typical," but until just now, I never recognized the Latin roots that make its specific meaning "everyday."

In the second line of King Lear, Gloucester says:

It did always seem so to us: but now, in the
division of the kingdom, it appears not which of
the dukes he values most; for equalities are so
weighed, that curiosity in neither can make choice
of either's moiety.

That certainly gives sufficient context to guess that "moiety" means something like "division" or "share," though its more precise definition -- "half" -- is less clear. (The very first line in the play indicates the choice is between two dukes -- Albany and Cornwall.)

Publishers want to sell dictionaries, but the skill of being able to figure out a workable definition of a word based on its context is actually more important to literacy than the ability to memorize words on a list.

"There are days when I watch 'The Daily Show,' and I kind of chuckle. There are days when I laugh out loud. There are days when I stand up and point to the TV and say, 'You're damn right!'" says Brown, chair of the communications department at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and an associate professor of broadcast journalism.

Brown, who had dismissed the faux news show as silly riffing, got hooked during the early days of the war in Iraq, when he felt most of the mainstream media were swallowing the administration's spin rather than challenging it. Not "The Daily Show," which had no qualms about second-guessing the nation's leaders. "The stock-in-trade of 'The Daily Show' is hypocrisy, exposing hypocrisy. And nobody else has the guts to do it," Brown says. "They really know how to crystallize an issue on all sides, see the silliness everywhere." --Rachel Smolkin --What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart  (American Journalism Review)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." --Reagan's 'tear down this wall' speech 20 years later (USA Today | AP)

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. --Rick Bozich --Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game: Bennett removed for blogging super-regional (Courier-Journal)

I'm posting this version because I find it interesting that, when the Courier-Journal reported on the incident, it emphasized the involvement of the paper, while when this story attracts the blogosphere, it will be the identity of the reporter as a staff blogger that gives the story legs.

It's unusual for a newspaper to interview its own staff members, but the paper's executive editor, Bernie L. Ivory, gets a few good zingers about First Amendment rights, and a lawyer-friendly response to a claim that the NCAA threatened to punish the University of Louisville if officials did not revoke the reporter's press pass: "If that's true, that's nothing short of extortion and thuggery."

The Courier-Journal carefully included the "If that's true" part of Ivory's quote, which is a good hedge against future accusations of libel. (See this current story about how selective quoting made Edwards sound like he was talking about the Paris Hilton saga, when in fact he twice said he wasn't talking about her.)

The reporter was warned before the game that if he blogged during the game, it was in violation of NCAA policies. He consulted his editors, and went ahead and blogged anyway.

"In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth." --Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)

I had signed up for his course on American Pragmatism, for what would have been my fourth semester in the MA program at the University of Virginia. But I finished my degree after my third semester and withdrew from all my U.Va. classes in order to work full-time.

As a tender young MA student, I found Rorty's philosophy a bit hollow, and his relativism too far along the slippery slope of postmodernism. He was the respondent when Fredric Crews gave a lecture on Christian Humanism. I learned quite a bit about the profession by watching these two learned gentlemen disagree with each other intellectually, yet remain personable and even jovial throughout the evening. I signed up for his course because I thought he would either help me to take the plunge and overcome my fears of postmodernism, or help me more clearly articulate where I disagreed with it.

Now that I have taught courses in aesthetics and critical theory, I wish I had taken that class. Advanced scholars have had far more opportunity to understand and account for their own personal biases than tender young MA students. I have learned that researching critical theory isn't terribly useful when I was only grazing through the literature looking for quotes to support the argument I had already formed even before I started writing the paper.

That is, of course, why I didn't like pragmatism -- it argued that there is no universal truth, there are only useful conventions that society clings to as long as the conventions fulfill a need. That's the kind of statement that shakes one's bedrock beliefs, but in later years I've realized it also clears the way for a fascinating examination of the humanist approach to morality, which is very important when you are asking students from diverse cultural backgrounds to assess issues of morality and universality in a text -- and, by extension, in the real world.

Last year I was a Sunday-school teacher for fourth graders, and I found myself prefacing every doctrinal statement with "The Catholic Church teaches..." and trying to encourage discussions, rather than simply giving them a list of received truths to memorize. I covered the material, of course, and from an orthodox perspective, often asking them to talk with their parents when they brought up touchy subjects like the fate of babies who die before baptism and how seriously they should take artistic representations of heaven and hell. I've never told my own children that they will go to hell if they are disobedient, for example; I have told my five-year-old that until she reaches the age of reason, it's Mommy and Daddy's job to help her listen to her conscience, and that includes punishing her when she gives into temptation. My nine-year-old knows that we have greater expectations for his ability to reason, so that if he and Carolyn make the same mistake in judgment, the consequences for him are more severe.

I might get faster responses from my children if they feared that demons would drag them away if they were disobedient, but that kind of obedience doesn't build character or develop moral intelligence.

On the last day of Sunday School, I was hoping to encourage their desire to learn more about the world, so after I said goodbye, I told them "Never stop asking questions!" Most of them kind of stared at me blankly. When one kid asked, "Why?" they all froze in their seats waiting for me to explain myself. I didn't.

While my wife and I are raising our children in the traditions of our Catholic faith, we are working hard to avoid the "Because I say so" and "Don't ask questions" approach to authority. My son has internalized the Socratic method so much that when he wants to get mouthy and talk back, he does so with rhetorical questions, thus drawing me into a conversation that (he hopes) will buy him time to figure out a way to avoid doing whatever he doesn't want to do. It's not exactly disobedience, but he is testing limits, making me supply good reasons for why he should obey.

Pragmatic? In the short term, it can be stressful and annoying. But I hope that always maintaining a close association between reason, authority, and morality will benefit my children in the long run.

BioShock will be Ken Levine's magnum opus. It will be his career defining game. It's ambitious, unusual and aggressive, mixing the high polish expected of a "next generation" shooter, with equal parts storytelling, politics, and philosophy, all wrapped up in a bloody, underwater, 1940's bow.

[...]

The most prominent character in BioShock -- Andrew Ryan, Rapture's founder -- is an embodiment of a self-centered, free-will political ideology called Objectivism. Objectivism is the brainchild of 1960s author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand. She defined it thus: "Man as a Heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute." Put more simply, an Objectivist says "the world is what it is, my place in it is important, the only way to know anything is to use your own head, and the best political system is one that leaves me the hell alone. "Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand meets Howard Hughes," explains Levine.

The initial plot of BioShock -- the founding of this utopia -- mirrors the plot (albeit through a glass darkly) of Rand's 1960's epic book "Atlas Shrugged." In "Atlas Shrugged" the worlds elite -- the "atlases" -- stage a minor rebellion and remove themselves to a better place: a valley where they can be free of the eye and hand of the world's governments and those who would leech off their talents. While the rhetoric of Rapture's founder, Andrew Ryan (an anagram of Ayn Rand with an extra "rew" thrown in for obfuscation) sounds like a Randian polemic, his nemesis is ambiguously named "Atlas." To figure out which one is really the good guy or the bad guy, we'll all have to play the game.

BioShock's story -- for those who wish to stop blowing things up to delve into it -- is about translating this Objectivist ideology into the real world. "One of the things that's very appealing about Rand to me, and about Rapture, is at least in the beginning they're driven by reason." Indeed, this is what attracts most people to Objectivism: it's based on rationality above all else. By both highlighting and skewering Objectivism, Levine's on the warpath against zealots. "I'm trying to write about what happens when real people try to do things," he explains. "The characters in Ayn Rand's books are paragons." But paragons aren't real people, and Levine has written his characters to be as real as possible. They may be drawn in broad strokes, but they're human. "Real people aren't perfect. That's the problem with ideologies. Real people carry out ideologies. So even the best of intentions gets screwed up."

To attempt to do this in a game -- not a college art project, but an actual commercial blockbuster game -- is phenomenally ambitious. "You don't elevate the discussion by saying 'listen to me!'" says Levine. "You get it by saying 'look this is awesome, oh and by the way we're also talking about being a human being. We're also talking about power.'" --BioShock (Gamers with Jobs)

This is a great find. I'm a student (with a full time job), who uses the web a lot in my research. I've found that there are many insightful comments out there, but failed to use them due to 1) fear of not properly citing them 2) fear that they will be rejected as credible sources. It wasn't until yesterday that I realized that my current paper really needs to cite a few comments in order to make some points. Thanks again![Submitted Comment] (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The above is the text of a comment that someone submitted to an old blog entry about how to cite weblog comments in MLA style.

I didn't publish it, because the URL supplied by the poster was the home page of a company that offers search-engine optimization services. In the space where the name was supposed to be, the poster added some Google-friendly keywords.

A hand-made personalized commercial message may not fit the strict definition of spam, but it's still an unwelcome submission.

CNN is widely credited with initiating the acceleration of the modern news cycle with the fall 2006 debut of its spin-off channel CNN:24, which provides a breaking news story, an update on that story, and a news recap all within 24 seconds. In addition to creating its groundbreaking format, CNN:24 broke many important stories with reports such as "Ford No Money Everyone Fired," "Iraq Bomb Kill Truck," "Country Hates Bush," "Dow High Now," and "Squirrel Water Skis."

"TV news reporting has always been about breaking the story down into only the barest, most salient facts, but the breakneck pace of contemporary reportage doesn't allow for that anymore," said Professor Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. "Today's ace reporter isn't the one with the best command of the language, but the one who can say 'Congress!' or 'Health care?' or 'Slam dunk!' with the most appropriate expression on his or her face." --Media Landscape Redefined By 24-Second News Cycle (The Onion (Satire))

You may or may not be familiar with V-Tech Rampage, a flash game created by Ryan Lambourn. True to its title, the game allows the player to take on the role of Cho Seung-Hui and re-enact the fateful school shooting of April 16th. The game drew hatred from the mainstream media and gamers alike; many feel the game to have no ultimate purpose other than allowing players to kill simply for the sake of killing.

Similar complaints have been lodged against Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, created by Danny Ledonne. Like V-Tech Rampage, SCMRPG allows the player to take the roles of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the day they massacred twelve of their peers.

In an effort to get Lambourn's side of the story and answer some nagging questions I had for Ledonne, I interviewed these two frequently despised, often applauded game creators about the possible importance of their games. --Virtual school shooings: interviewing two of the most hated game creators alive (Destructoid)

Ryan Lambourn, the creator of V-Tech Rampage, sounds defensive and juvenile. I haven't played his game yet, so I'm just filing this for later.

Same with I'm O.K. - A Murder Simulator