Media is the Message: Neo-Oral Post Literate Liberal Art

(The 2 Economies)

Always for the Sake of Argument,
or what’s a College For?

Bullet: Gideon Burdick’s Caucus Concern with
Student Identity and What Attracts Them Here.

Bullet: Cathy Kramer’s concern on Campus Substance Abuse

Bullet: The Great College to Work for Concerns

Bullet: Our Liberal Arts Gen Ed Component and whether
we say what we’re doing and whether we’re doing
it or not and whether we can prove that we’re doing
what we say we’re doing in these days of transparency
and accountability and turbulent economic times.

We might could bundle all 4 of these concerns,
like Charter. The media is the message.

They told us….we could not define an area as
"Any course from one of the following departments..."
Our areas have to be defined in terms of what we
expect to actually occur in that course. Specifically,
we are some day going to have to be more clear on
what we expect students to learn by taking these
eight courses and then provide evidence that
this learning is actually taking place.

The Literature area requirement is designed to
introduce students to ways of understanding,
interpreting, and responding to primary works
of imaginative literature. The objective of the
requirement is to develop a student’s informed
literary and aesthetic judgment. (Harvard Template?)

*******
I taught 7th & 8th grades in a small Quaker school
in Buck's County, PA my first 3 years out--having
nothing but a Philosophy degree to wallow around
with; and then taught 10th, 11th, 12th grade so-called
Gifted & Academically Talented students in Durham,
NC: genre studies, American & English literature surveys
where my pedagogy was what? what the? what the hell?
’Sup? So what?

Many of the texts were new to me and I couldn't give
students the scoop (take this down etc.) or play faux-
Socratic guess-what's-on- my-mind. Rather it was all
like: what's going on here, huh? what do you think.

Open questions.

Official description of aims and objectives during
those daze in Durham where lesson plans were
obligatory but not enforced and curriculum county-
wide sounded pretty much the same as we sing-song
now 40 years later, lofted up a level to "higher education"
& catalog rhetoric.

Granted the book ban-ers were still active; Huck Finn
and Catcher in the Rye were on the list; an adjunct at
Chapel Hill was fired for abusing John Donne, but everyone
wanted children to be inaugurated into imaginative
literature if not imagination.

introduced to ways of etc
interpreting etc
responding etc
informing literary and aesthetic judgment

Not that there's anything wrong with that—
same old same old Introduction to Poetry.
Introduction to Fiction. American Literature
Survey. English Literature survey. Deja View.

And then
provide
evidence
that this
learning
is actually
taking place.

No wonder students have Restless Legs Syndrome
and Selective Early Stage Attention Deficiency
acquiring habits of drug & narcotic sexual predation;
& how are we going to regulate their behavior in a
community that repeats the old as if it were new &
requires it, too? Unawares. And then provide evidence
that this learning is actually taking place.

That no one but me finds this demand pedagogically
damaging speaks to our failure in the education &
practice of both arts and sciences if not the social
sciences for whom maybe this concern I guess makes
good sense seeing as it 's the Dominant Paradigmatic
Attitude of currently Chronicled Industrially
Institutionalized Education these days.
Matriculation Talk Fodder.

What?
I overstate?
I read Walter Whitman
And Ralph Waldo Emerson:
am large--contain multitudes, legions,
& acknowledge hob goblins of my own
little mind--inconsistencies and how
to be great is to be misunderstood if
not necessarily the other way round,
a product of a liberal art education.

The College Version: whatever you took
in H.S, we'll do IT right, now. In my
Introduction to Fiction syllabus, I spend
half a page re-introducing the notion of
introducing as well as insisting that IT's
ALL FICTION for crying out loud : fiction
fashioning fact and faction. IT, I said.
Do I have to be spelling IT out?

Fast days at Jordan High: I met with
students 5 hours a week for a year: same
bunch 2 years in succession. In college, what?
2 1/2 times a week for half a year?

Redundancy. Nature loves it.
Probably a good thing--repetition
repeated repeatedly. In which case
everything I'm saying is moot.

xxxooo, Sam