Majors & Minors & Capstone
events.
Dear Upcoming Linguists, Fictionists,
Transcendentists & My Colleagues
Across the Curriculum.
(Coursing w/o Borders series)
Here’s the challenge I face (and I bet
Gary Hawkins will back me on this):
something like how to be appreciating
Dead and Alive ( 2 economies) without
letting either contaminate the other.
Let Dead be DEAD, I say,
and Live be Alive -- & not collapse,
conflate, & confuse them so they can
just get along because other wise it ends
up dead & deadening all over the place.
Dead is boss. Rules!
I know this, but like so many things:
can’t practice—walk the talk. By nature
I’m necrophiladelphian, preferring D&D
to L&L: a matter of convenience &
predictability, don’t like things wiggling
when I try and do my bidness.
Measuring. Assessing. Evaluating.
Nailing IT down. IT, I said.
But I aim to make room for live. Here’s
something LIKE the problem (stay with
me here, suspend belief and disbelief) :
A) My courses are a joke & waste of time.
B) My courses are a joke & waste of time.
Statement A, of course, accurately measures
and assesses my courses from the Common
Sense Standard where the demanding values
of rigor, clarity, consistency of aim and purpose,
“knows-his-stuff” (teacher/student) and "getR
done" drives a semester's work program, and
grades and grading move & motivate it.
Statement B describes the antithetical let’s say
diabolically opposed values of eurekics, heuristics:
oh-I get-it punch line potential generated by fooling
around indeterminately, juggling ideas in play,
round & round circling back where we started from
and maybe knowing it for the first time maybe not:
can’t say for sure but there’s no rush or dead lines etc.
Incommensurate: A & B
Can’t assess one in the terms and values of the other
without doing injustice, collapsing and contaminating
the qualities characteristic of each: the industrious
& instrumental and the ludic & playful.
2 economies: hostile of course, vis a vis on the face of it:
but complementary overall in an environment that can
keep separate so as to relate.
Dead & Alive
The value of Statement B, of course, is some what
incredible, given the fact that Statement A dominates
and casts overwhelming stigma on the validity of jokes
joking juggling and wasting time.
Need we argue?
Noblesse Oblige
In accredited-constrained institutionalized academia,
I’ve found it makes sense simply to acknowledge the
dominant negative evaluation against Statement B
values and simply say yes yes to Statement A in its
own terms of course: my courses--
bunch of jokers sitting on the dock
of the bay, say: wasting time—
Call us Fools Rush Inn.
Because any defense challenges the sanctity of rigor
and discipline as it’s institutionally understood and
encouraged:
rigorous fooling around?
disciplined waste of time?
It would take something like an immaculate conception
& 40 years in the wildness so to speak to accommodate
these 2 sets of value (the 2 economies) in a way that does
not do injustice to either.
It’d be like building an ice cream parlor in hell without
dereliction to hot or cold.
It’s possible.
But it’s an environmental issue.
On the level of building a shared frame of mind,
attitude, outlook. Frame discourse, it’s called.
Edification. Addressing holes-in-the-roof rather
than always dealing with floods in the kitchen and
when it’s not raining no problem
General Education agenda, not your majors,
minors, and capstone events. Dead & Alive &
why shouldn't they both get along?
xxxooo, Sam
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