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Saturday 22 February 2014
Best News Ever for Teachers: Everything Works!
Tuesday 18 February 2014
Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs
The graph above shows the relationship between performance and arousal which could be applied to a number of different activities, including teaching. If you are bored and uninterested, your level of performance will be low. A certain level of excitement, passion and arousal will optimize your performance; however, if you become too aroused, over-excited and hyperactive, your level of arousal will have a negative effect on your performance.
Sunday 16 February 2014
How to Make Love to a Logophile?
What does it mean when John gives Mary flowers?
For more than a dozen years, I taught an introductory literature course to 60 or so first-year undergraduates, 80% of whom were young women--a number of whom would typically report being interested in questions of love and romance. Every year in the first class I described the following scenario and asked the class what word they would use to describe this young man’s actions.
What is the verb for when a man pursues a woman?
As I presented this hypothetical heterosexual scenario, I could feel Judith Butler and the gender police breathing down my neck, but bear with me. So what do we call what John is doing? Over the years I noticed a shifting in the tenor of the answers. The typical mid-90s answer was that he “was cruising,” “on the make,” “hitting on her” and, cutting to the chase, “trying to get laid.” At the millennium the answers became strident: “he’s a sexual predator,” and “it’s patriarchal oppression” and “hegemonic domination.” In more recent years the pendulum swung back slightly and it was typical to hear reported that it’s not about him but them: “they are friends with benefits” or “they’re dating” or “hooking up.”
Without "wooing" and "courtship" is romance dead?
As I called the room to order, I reminded my students of what they already knew: that the expressions they had given me did not include the correct verb for the scenario I had described. When pressed, someone would eventually come up with the proper expression: “to court.” Eliciting the older and much more English verb “to woo,” even among students who claimed to have read Romeo and Juliet where the lexeme is used a half dozen times, was a much greater challenge. I eventually asked my students when they had last used the expressions “to court” or “to woo” in conversation. The point of my questions was to provoke philological reflection on the relationship between language and culture using an example that I knew mattered to a lot of them. What does it mean that there are no current, earnest words for courtship? Does this gap in the vernacular prove that romance is no longer part of our daily culture? The number of advertisements I see for dating and match-making companies and web sites tell me that there is a void in the culture which consumer capitalism has been moving rapidly and vigorously to fill.
"Making love" before 1920 and after
The scenario I have described used to be called “making love.” Thanks to Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, we can now date the shift in meaning to what Wharton called the “French sense” of the expression (i.e., having sex) to just before 1920 in the USA. We might also associate this American shift of mores with the automobile, which F. Scott Fitzgerald likened, in his famous essay on the 1920s, to a bedroom on wheels.
"Making love" in the 19th century
It would be perfectly reasonable for us to imagine a conversation between two men in the 19th century in which one mentions fairly casually to the other, “I noticed you making love to my sister last night.” Modern readers are likely to misinterpret Algernon’s meaning when he tells Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest, “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” Not a very nice sentiment, but not quite as bad as it sounds. “To make love” in this context means to display the courtship rituals I have described above; it does not mean to copulate.
"The Rules" for making love
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the earliest usage of “to court” meaning “to pay amorous attention or make love” as 1580. The OED dates the Old English verb “to woo” as 1050. Oddly, the OED describes “to woo” as “Now somewhat homely” but contradicts itself by adding “also poetic.” (Much as we might love the OED--and I do--we should remember that the original version was significantly compiled by a homicidal maniac confined to a lunatic asylum. See: The Professor and the Madman.) “To court” is also a problematic expression because of its elitism since it explicitly refers to what goes on in the royal court and more specifically what went on in the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine where the rules of “courtly love” were first written. The rest of us peasants and plebeians were to get by in whatever way we could, clubbing women over the heads in Neanderthal fashion and dragging them off to our caves I suppose. I feel like the Grinch in saying so, but a lot of the behaviours which people today point to as evidence of “true love” are the remnants of the rules of “courtly love” codified in the 11th century under the supervision of Queen Eleanor and her daughter. Over the last 30 years, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider have turned their version of The Rules of “courtly love” into a not-so-cottage industry.
Making love to a logophile
Oh yes, the answer to the question posed in the title of this post: a “logophile” is a lover of words, so the answer is almost redundant-- with words!
Wednesday 18 September 2013
Parti Québécois Hypocrisy Has a New Face
Monday 16 September 2013
According to the PQ, "Loving Your Mother" Is Not a Québécois Value
Since first hearing about the Parti Québécois’ proposed “Charte des valeurs,” I have gone through the typical range of emotions that I keep hearing all around me: outrage, shame, embarrassment, anger, frustration, fear. What most continues to bewilder me is the idea that any democratic government feels that it can legislate the values of its people. If a Taliban government announced that it was planning to legislate a charter of values for Afghanistan, I could at least recognize a level of coherence. But who ever heard of a western democracy announcing plans to legislate people’s values?
Sunday 23 June 2013
Do No Harm Part III: Don’t Joke about the Bible
Do Not presume
I hope I have made it clear that I have not lived up to my own recommendation that teachers should avoid irony. The best I have been able to do, and I suspect this will be true for most teachers, is to be careful and to be wary of the pitfalls of irony. In recent years I saw a dramatic increase in the multicultural mix in my classes: students from Africa, the Caribbean, the former Yugoslavia, Iran, China, Japan and various Arab countries. Over the years, I had learned from lecturing on feminism and what used to be called “women’s liberation” not to presume to know what individual women want or, worse still, should want. Even though, I was supposed to be the expert on “culture” and “intercultural communication,” I think I knew enough not to presume that I understood my students' lives, and to recognize that I had a lot to learn from them. In general, I was in awe of their openness and resilience. H.G. Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind” provided a perfect framework for discussing the challenges of respecting, adopting, adapting to and negotiating new cultures. I think I did alright with these students. The group of students which proved the greatest challenge for me and who were increasingly present in my classes in the new millennium were what I would describe in general terms as “evangelical Christians.”On Being "born again through Jesus"
A professor teaching at a university in Alabama once told me that he could not invite students to say anything personal in their essays. As he explained, if there were 50 students in the class, he would get 45 essays describing “how I was born again through Jesus.” The proportions I faced were about the reverse; around 10% of students in my courses would express Christian convictions if I invited them to express personal opinions as well as knowledge of literature and theory in their essays. The presence of evangelical Christians in my classes was the opposite of a problem. They were typically among the nicest students in the room: they were punctual, attentive, polite, respectful, typically sat at the front of the room, participated actively and asked questions. You can’t argue with those kinds of behaviours.Why question when God is the answer to everything?
Nonetheless I was compelled to announce in my classes that while I was aware and respectful of the psychological comfort which a belief in God and religious faith might afford individuals, the context of the courses I gave was science, rationality and reason. I typically explained to students that Nietzsche’s aphorism “God is dead,” which had taken hold in the 20th century, was a pithier version of the physicist Laplace’s much earlier declaration that “God is a hypothesis of which the world no longer has need.” We created God (and gods) because we needed answers to so many questions about the world we found ourselves living in. As science began to answer these questions, the need for God as an answer to these questions faded. The disadvantage of a firm belief in God and of religious faith dominating our thinking is the same reason we call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages and the Age of Reason which followed the Enlightenment: God can be a quick and easy answer to every question and consequently slow down if not outright prohibit rational and scientific inquiry. Why go through the hard work of thinking if you have a ready-made answer to every question? God did it! It is so because God wants it to be.How to talk about the Bible?
This was the warning I issued to students: don’t use God to avoid the hard work of thinking through an issue. This caveat was accepted with varying degrees of willingness, but where I was eventually taken to task was on how I talked about the Bible. My comeuppance came in the form of a mature and able student, a mother of adolescent children, who was planning to open a religious-based school with her husband after graduation. The student made an appointment with me to discuss very seriously (“complain about” would be an accurate locution but one she avoided using) the way I talked about the Bible.The Bible is a book worth reading
Her concern was that I was discouraging students from reading the Bible. This was a contention that I took very seriously. In the first place, I counted myself among a relatively small number of professors in my field who required students to read parts of the Bible as a prerequisite to the study of literature. More importantly, I regularly informed students that, although it did not sound particularly elevated or refined, what I taught was reading. (Although the titles used to describe what I taught kept changing—English, English Studies, Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies—the skill set I was passing on and encouraging students to develop remained the same: reading and writing. I must confess that my secret desire has long been to be known as a “philologist,” which not only has a high sounding tone but fairly accurately described what I researched and taught.) While I thought she was wrong to think that I discouraged students from reading the Bible, she gave me pause to reconsider the ironic tone with which I exposed the Bible to students.Adam and Eve; Pandor and Epimetheus
I typically began an introductory course comparing the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with the Greek myth of Pandora and Epimetheus, noting for example how women consistently get the blame for introducing evil into the world. Do these stories prove that this is the way women are? Or maybe what explains the stories is that they were written by men. However, what got my student on my case came much later. To introduce Shakespeare, I had to explain the Elizabethan Age, which of course meant introducing Elizabeth, which in turn meant explaining Henry VIII and at least the first two of his many wives, Catherine of Aragon and Elizabeth’s mother, Henry’s mistress and second wife, Anne Boleyn.Henry VIII, Deuteronomy and Leviticus
Henry’s problems began with the Bible. When Henry’s older brother Arthur, the heir apparent, died, political exigencies dictated that Henry marry Catherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow, to maintain an alliance with Spain. Henry was worried that marrying his sister-in-law might be incest. Such moral dilemmas were of course resolved by reference to the Bible. Luckily for the political wonks of the time, the Bible seemed quite clear, even insistent on the subject:Sometimes the Bible made me laugh and I shared the joke
No matter what your sexual morality, it seemed unfair, to me, to kill the animal. (Okay, definitely a tongue-in-cheek observation.) At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing that among these numerous, detailed rules governing sexual behaviour there was nothing against lesbianism. (At last, one small advantage in being woman!) I should have stopped there, but I didn’t.11When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:
12Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.
My Student was right to complain
My student was right to complain that I had no particular reason to draw attention to this passage (beyond the fact that it had drawn my attention). It seemed clear to me that this passage was not “the word of God,” but I could imagine it having been written by some man who had once had his gonads savaged by the wife of some guy he was putting the boots to (make that “sandals”). (Despite postmodern gibberish about “the death of the author,” it is always useful to consider who the author might have been as you attempt to fathom the meaning of a text.)And yet I was right to question the Bible as a guide to modern morality
To my surprise when my student had discussed the problem with her pastor, I had to agree with what she reported his opinion to be. The Bible was written by relatively pragmatic individuals, with a narrow range of experience, dealing with the specific, down-to-earth problems of their tribal group or community. I couldn’t agree more, but I was left to wonder how evangelicals get from this reasonable observation to the idea that the Bible is “the word of God” and should be used to determine modern morality.But Toning down the irony was the right thing to do
Nonetheless, I had to agree with my student that I should (and I did) tone down my irony in discussing the Bible and avoid lingering tangentially over Deuteronomy. I think we reached an agreeable compromise and managed to maintain mutual respect. The student chose to do at least one more course with me and when I met her a couple of weeks ago in the grocery store she suggested I might want to teach in the school she and her husband were setting up. (Of course, now I have to wonder if she wasn't being ironic.)Monday 27 May 2013
Do No Harm Part II: Avoid Irony
In Education, sometimes less is more
I used to teach a course on Public Speaking. It took me three years to figure out how to properly organize and deliver the course. I think I finally did it right in the third year. The trick was to abandon my teacher ego (a subject for a future post), get out of the way, take care of administrative and secretarial necessities of the course, and allow the students to perform and to educate each other—as much as I could (which was never easy for me). A majority of the students who took this course were from the Faculty of Education and consequently destined for careers as educators. One message I passed on to all the students, especially those planning to become teachers: avoid irony.Every Joke has a victim
This is very complicated advice because if you ask students to list the five features they appreciate in teachers, a “sense of humour” is bound to appear consistently in the list. (Here is another issue that I suspect teacher training programs never deal with. Are there any education courses out there on “how to be funny”?) At the core of any “joke” there is bound to be some form of irony and a victim. I will try to avoid giving one of my three-hour lectures on the subject of irony, but if you are curious you might look at Linda Hutcheon’s book, Irony’s Edge and/or Paul de Man’s “The Concept of Irony” in Aesthetic Ideology.Verbal Irony means saying what you don't mean
Verbal irony is saying one thing, but you really mean something else quite different. The lowest form of verbal irony is the most familiar: sarcasm. A teacher being sarcastic with students is trying to be hurtful. Unacceptable, but that is only part of the problem. Irony by its very nature is always ambiguous. No matter how clear or obvious a teacher might think s/he is being when being ironic, the fact is a number of different messages are being transmitted to students at the same time, and individual students are going to have to figure out which message is the right one. Whatever message they choose, they are going to be wrong because the “real” meaning of an ironic statement doesn’t exist. Irony is deliberately confusing; it does not transmit clear, singular meanings. If you ask someone what an ironic statement “really” means they are bound to be wrong. According to Linda Hutcheon, the question would be the same as me asking you what this picture “really” represents.Faced with verbal irony, you are never supposed to ask "what do you mean?"
Verbal irony can be quite innocent and lighthearted or unintended or very aggressive. The problem is we can never know, with certainty, which. Let’s try a case. You arrive at work one morning and your colleague says: “you’re looking sexy today.” If your colleague is old and creepy, you begin to contemplate your sexual harassment suit; if young and attractive, you flash your brightest smile and strike a pose. However, there is something in your colleague’s tone that puts a question mark in your mind. (With irony, tone is everything.) Does your colleague really mean that “you are looking sexy” or is the colleague being ironic and therefore intending another meaning? So, of course, you ask with an earnest glare: “What do you mean?”The Multiple Meanings of an ironic utterance
We’ve all been there, so we know the answer will be something like: “oh nothing,” “just kidding around,” “don’t be so serious,” etc, etc, dodge, evade and duck (or is it a rabbit?). Now you are left to try and figure out what your colleague really meant and, of course, the more you think about it, the more the number of possibilities expands. The least likely possibility now seems to be that you are looking sexy this morning; your colleague earnestly thinks so and said so. You enumerate the possibilities. You had to get dressed in a rush this morning, missed the bus, etc. Your colleague is telling you that you look a mess, or at least below your usual standards. Option two, worse still, you are the least sexy person in the office and everyone knows it. It is a big joke to describe you as “looking sexy.” Or maybe the message is quite the opposite; it’s that you are trying too hard or you have overdone it and gone too far. Your apparel is, in fact, too sexy. You’ve gone passed sexy to slut/pimp. You are inappropriately dressed for the office. At the same time, you infer that your colleague wants to initiate a “sexy” conversation with you. What’s that about?What teachers say matters
Contrary to popular stereotypes, students are affected by what teachers tell them. Moreover, there is a pretty good chance that the most passive-aggressive student in the room is also the most thin-skinned and insecure. Imagine you are a student and your teacher is in the habit of being ironic. Not only has your teacher confused you with multiple messages that you are unable to decode, but some of those messages, as far as you have been able to figure them out, are personally insulting and hurtful. Your teacher on the other hand is thinking that s/he has such a great rapport with students that they have a fine time joking with each other.Humour is a double-edged sword
It may not sound like it from this blog, but humour is an important part of my lecture style, my teaching in general and my personality. I absolutely believe that teaching by example is the most important kind of teaching, and where teachers most often fail. (I am convinced that if they were giving a lecture on “The Importance of Punctuality,” a number of my colleagues would show up late—and would have trouble understanding why that was a problem!) Nonetheless, I have certainly been guilty of irony in my classes. I have tried to mitigate the potential damage by warning students that I tell jokes (or at least relate anecdotes and recount comic examples) for two perfectly justifiable pedagogical motives: The first is that I am illustrating a point in a fashion that I hope will make the point memorable (and I beg the students to remember the point I was making and not just the joke). The second motive is that looking out across the room I can see that everyone is on the verge of falling asleep. Whatever significant knowledge I was hoping to get across at that moment was DOA, so I might as well stir the room with something random with the hope of rekindling curiosity and concentration a few moments hence.Comedy and ironic distance
However, tell yourself any two jokes that you know well, and chances are they both involve a victim. Stories are funny because someone is or does something foolish or something unfortunate happens to them that makes us laugh. We need a certain distance from these characters in order for us to laugh at what befalls them. Northrop Frye calls this distance “ironic” in his categorization of the modes of literature. We cannot be too close to the characters, too sympathetic or concerned, or the joke won’t seem funny. Generally, we feel superior to the characters in a joke or funny story.Cuckoos and cuckoldry
In late medieval humour the most common theme was cuckoldry. A cuckold (just to remind you, because it is not a word often used these days) is a husband whose wife has sex with another man. (There is no equivalent term for a betrayed wife, but the etymology isn’t quite as sexist as it sounds. The origin is the cuckoo bird which was known for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests. The implication is that a cuckold suffers not because his wife has sex with someone else but because he might unknowingly end up raising someone else’s offspring. People who have seen the movie but not read the novel will likely not recognize the intimations of betrayed masculinity—as well as insanity—in the title One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest). In more contemporary times, until the recent ascendency of political correctness, the “victim” was usual a gendered or ethnic or regional or class stereotype.Teachers: are you ready to be the butt of your own jokes?
If you are going to “be funny” with students, you have to ask yourself: what is the relationship between the victim of your humour and your audience? One way you as a teacher can be sure you are not going to victimize someone with your humour is to make yourself the victim. I do on occasion make myself the butt of my own jokes, but this is not a gambit I recommend for any teacher who may be having concerns about maintaining status, respect and proper decorum with students. If you observe stand-up comedians these days, self-mockery or at least putting themselves in the role of the “dumb” character is a common strategy. It is also worth noting that the word “irony” derives from the dissembling character in ancient Greek comedy called the eirôn who appeared to be inferior and unintelligent but would triumph over the braggart in the end."No dark sarcasm in the classroom / Teachers leave them kids alone"
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