academics academics academics academics academics academics

 
Where do Angels Fear to Tread?
 
Write First: Think Later. In Composing Mode:
             War’s Better than Peace
 
You may be a business man or some high
degree thief, They may call you Doctor or
they may call you Chief

Soon: the incoming. 
 
We will initiate them into the mysteries of
college:  academics, work, service, well-ness,
study habits & time management, composition,
courses and requirements: introduce the college
experience of classroom contact hours, syllabi-
driven measurable goals & outcomes, assignments,
quizzes, tests, exams, papers, posters presentations
—the archetypal  “Course Structure” which will
shape their academic learning one course after
another, 4 simultaneous per semester, two semesters
 a year for 4 years.And you can see: a high serious
business reinforced by a grading system explained
in each syllabus along with office hours, attendance
and due-date policies  as well as arrangements
available for learning disabled accommodation.   
 
Consider that our General Education program might
be alternative to our Special Ed— the majors and the
minors —and not just sampling them or mixing a montage
of inter-disciplinarity soup like playing around with several
Crayolas rather than one, ok sure: but it’s still a course of
the same old coloring and pardon my mixed meta force..
 
George Castanza, for awhile, discovered that when he
acted opposite to his normal moves—ignoring his instincts,
countering his intuition: he’d had better luck with women. 
 
Bizzaro World.  Anti- to our Post Enlightenment Age of
Reasons Why,  New Oral: Smart Phonic: Can You Hear
Me Now?     
 
Bizzaro Academia as a Free for All: half-baked loose
thinking going on, guess & mess, seems to me, I don’t
know but I’ve been told, what-if and so-what like falling
backwards knowing many hands will catch me before
I hit the floor, reciprocating collegial correcting of every
error, setting me straight again and again like the way I
can Google up some misspelled notion or half-recollected
phrase and  it don’t  matter because corrections &
variations and  options pop up & I can continue on my
wayward  ways free to miss  take my   margin for errors
 & rooms for play.
 
How else work-thru all the contrariety  & opposition &
ambiguities, contra-addictions & glorious paradoxes
among ourselves and our trials & error-ing  incompleteness
theorizing indetermination,  linguistic & representational
inadequacies, noisy converse-action and be getting better
and good at it?
 
Generating local food for thought & empowerment..
Binging and Purging: the more the merrier,  plenty
more where that  comes from: our renewable resource
fullness.
 
Google’s corporate mission statement proclaims an aim
“to organize the world’s information and make it  
universally accessible and useful.”  So the facts
are at  hand—common wealth of knowledge
equally distributed among  players. No
accumulation acquisition inequities.
Desk top & laptop dancers need
apply, is all. It’s how we put
IT in play that counts, true?
 
      A Way of Knowing about ways of knowing
 
Pretend that for every way you’ve learned to KNOW from
first grade to PhD—the opposite is also true. Be careful to
make haste & take your time: you can’t know what you think
before you see yourself say it, write it, fooling  around with
every notion that comes along, prodigal and puritan: stringent,
acerbic: caustic in your discrimination yet indiscriminate;
show  don’t tell, say,  don’t be spelling it out,  listen to your
voices, idiot demons: practice objective correlation mindful
of  your audience and disregarding all: you  needn’t let whim
or will  o’ the whisper carry you away. Control. Balance,.
Go with the flow. 
 
Check your tuition-ized intuition at the doors. Don’t abandon;
merely set aside, see through  and appreciate what it’s  been
hiding all this  time after time. What  does it cost to have a
measurable goal, clear-cut  aim, unswerving  purpose —a
thesis driven paper, an agenda,   shopping list, controlling
metaphor & belief system,  prejudice,  bias, conviction, under-
lying assumptions, the attention deficit and liability that your
tuition-driven educating  manufactures?  I'm asking. 
 
Benefits are glaringly obvious, of course —attention efficiency
predicts,  self-fulfills, & validates, which is why it’s probably
impossible to see the liabilities: blinded by our ways of knowing:
habits of being, the brilliance of our habitatattoos if I might
mix meta force..  .
 
…”and they spent as much time speaking of Google’s culture—
engineers who always worked in teams and were given a sense of
freedom, three free and healthy meals a day, free massages, hair
cuts, and medical attention —as  about technology.”
 
 (Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.)
 
IT’s an Environmental Issue. IT, I said.
Need we argue?
 
xxxooo, Sam