On Keeping Up With Spanish

A few months ago, I posted on my attempts to re-learn Spanish using the mobile app Duolingo. In the meantime, I've kept at it: six days a week with at least some progress.

As the details of the language return to me, I find myself surprised that anything managed to stick.* At six months (more or less) of progress, I reached the point at which I recognized the need to now do something with my language study. Working on vocabulary exercises and verb tenses is nice but insufficient for any actual use. Consequently I've decided to supplement Duolingo with two additional sources. The first is a simple one-volume Spanish-for-reading textbook, and the other is with an actual in-Spanish version of a novel I know well in its English translation, 2666. Yes, like a crazy person I am beginning with a 900-page novel, albeit one divided into five smaller sections. The textbook is designed for people with no previous Spanish experience (thus I breezed through the first chapter in three or four days of 15-30 minutes of effort), and focused primarily on teaching one how to recognize the syntactical components of Spanish sentences: see the structure, figure out which words go together, learn what the words mean. And, indeed, there was something thrilling about making it through a page and a half of entirely Spanish text without need of a dictionary, even as I was perfectly aware of how basic the text was. For me, reading is at the basis of listening and speaking: if I can see the parts of a sentence that go together, then I can 'see' them when someone else is speaking, and I can produce them when I'm talking.

2666's purposes are more prosaic. As I learned many years ago with Latin, you can memorize all the verb tenses and noun declensions you like, but they are of little use reading and translating, because no one but Cicero ever wrote that way. The novel is a first cut of someone actually using the language to attempt to do things. I have found it to be considerably easier than I expected: after some growing pains, a couple pages a day presents no issues. The only thing hampering me at the moment, in fact, is the pedantic insistence on going over the text sentence-by-sentence in order to make sure I'm really understanding what is being said. Otherwise, I'd be worried that I relied too much on context clues to interpret the parts I couldn't directly understand. But how would that be any different than reading Shakespeare for the first time?

My goal remains reading Javier Marías' Así empieza lo malo before it is translated into English and, surprisingly enough, this looks to be an eminently plausible goal.


*I'm not convinced the textbooks we used in junior high and high school were part of the same program, and those from college were certainly different. The level of instruction was, charitably, variable, though I did benefit from two very good Spanish natives, one of whom was good at teaching us Spain's various dialects. Spanish instruction has to deal with a 'Mexico problem' in a way perhaps not comparable to other foreign languages--people who learn it primarily to be slightly better able to use it when vacationing in the culturally fraught sense of 'visiting Tijuana' as opposed to 'visiting Paris,' and instruction varies widely on how much in tolerates the also culturally fraught use of Spanglish (secondary education Spanish instruction, at least in my experience, has a lot of people whose experience of the Spanish-speaking world doesn't run much beyond visiting Mexico). Native speakers from Spain tend (again, in my experience) to be a lot less patient about all of this, and a lot more expansive in their concept of what Spanish has to offer, culturally.

Crooked Timber discusses the lack of education for instructors on the fine art of college teaching:

Tenure track faculty receive no training as teachers, and whereas they engage in intensive, daily, professional development activities with regard to their research, they typically receive only the lightest mentoring concerning their teaching, and they receive it from people who, themselves, have had no training and for whom neither teaching nor mentoring new teachers have been part of their professional development.

On this matter I have become something of a zealot, the end process of having a difficult time arranging a classroom in a way natural to me and satisfactory to students, and having talked many (,many) people through the same process. A (now successful) colleague in grad school once remarked that the academic job market is a strange one. One is hired to do a particular job--teach--but one's hiring and promotion depend almost entirely on research. While that is certainly stylized and not entirely true, depending as it does on the type of higher education institution one ends up at, it does get to one of the central oddities of the grad school process, namely the distinct emphasis given to research over teaching. I learned after a few years on the job market that expectations will be both high and low: most jobs will assume that someone who possesses a PhD will be able to generate decent new syllabi for any course reasonably within their field of study given no more time than a summer, but virtually no experience other than serving as Instructor of Record will count as 'actually' teaching.

While the assumption of general competence is usually correct--it doesn't take that long to master new subject matter once one knows how to research--the idea that teaching is just a natural outcropping of the research process is exceedingly strange. To see this, one need look no further than people who are grading for the first time, who are usually plunged into a state of existential terror by the prospect of being objectively wrong in their assessment of a student's work and of properly calibrating the grading scale for the entire class. It applies to matters great and small: putting together a lecture (hearing hundreds or thousands of lectures is not much of a help unless you already know what to be listening for), writing assignments, determining the right balance of out-of-class work in a syllabus, running a discussion section (especially in a class where controversial subject matter will come up), and on through such basic questions as where does my authority in the classroom come from? and into such intricacies as handling plagiarism, mental health issues, and failing students. The average instruction given to the average grad student about this is minimal. Though I believe I was (and remain) a good instructor in the classroom, I got there by cobbling together the information my own professors would periodically share about their teaching, through the luck of TAing for the same courses multiple times (and so being able to think about what made the professor so effective and beloved rather than making sure I followed the content), a healthy amount of outside reading on pedagogy, and notably crashing and burning my first time as Instructor of Record. (It was not a failure, for the record. I did fine. But I made a few missteps, did not enjoy myself by the end, and it showed. I would also completely revamp that syllabus.)

The biggest leap came from finally getting access to the teaching and learning opportunities available to tenure-track faculty. By that time I had the combination of experience and theory necessary to take control of the courses I was teaching, and the general teaching-and-learning material that came into my hands could be put to use; most crucially, I knew when to put aside the advice of others as being unfit for what I was attempting to do. The solution to this problem is more intensive focus on teaching at the earliest stages (where there is more time and the incentives are different than once one is on the job market), hand-holding through the first attempts and gradually increasing the skill set of grad students as time goes on. Duke had a few of these programs when I was in my PhD program, and I did not take advantage of nearly as many as I should have--but more are needed.

A friend of mine from high school--more correctly, a Harvard-attending semi-notable journalist friend of mine--attempted to engage productively with Jon Chait's essay on microaggression (or something: I learned long ago how to sniff out and avoid that which reeks of this is not going to lead to a productive discussion) by pointing to various true and accurate facts about what it's like to be a white male heterosexual in the United States of America if one is aware that it is such a thing to be one of those, and not neutral experience. It did not go well. 

As one of those white men, here's (some of) what I've learned about interacting across boundaries. It is important, first, to recognize that not all spaces are yours. You may be interested in them, you may want to learn from them, you might see them making errors that could be corrected, but you will always and fundamentally be an outsider. That is fine. Remember that people are not always looking for allies who have disagreements with them, even if those disagreements are reasonable and limited and could be worked out in dialogue (see Tim Burke on this topic). That is also fine. There are some situations in which dialogue, even in the best of situations, will prove to be unproductive. That's fine, too. You're dealing with neither more nor less than the standard burdens of having a conversation in a world where people disagree with each other. You don't know everything, but neither does anyone else. You're not obligated to give up an argument because someone else is making a different one (even if that argument is an emotional appeal, even appeals based on life experience), but you should be careful to always be testing what you believe and trying to find potential things you may have overlooked. That is neither more nor less than the standard ethical duty of being a human. 

(There are a lot of books out there that talk about experiences far removed from your own. It's probably a good idea to read widely from them. This is true for everybody.)

If you find yourself in a position where you are not welcome in a particular space, or find yourself having an unproductive conversation, it's worthwhile to remember how much of the very important work happens when no one is arguing: in the things we teach our children, in how we treat friends and strangers, in the attitudes we demonstrate and in what we expect from others. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt ends by quoting Augustine--initium ut esset homo creatus est, "that a beginning be made, man was created"--and relying on the hope presented by every new-born person as the real vehicle for change. That seems as good a basis as any around which to work.

(There are some supplementary issues for those of us who teach, or have taught, in the obligation to create a classroom that is theoretically and in practice open to the spectrum of opinion, which requires a careful selection of texts and an authoritative hand in guiding discussion to create a space where people are allowed to disagree--to be wrong--without fear of their grade or the immediate reaction their comments may inspire. This is true for conservatives and liberals, the religious and the secular, and every socioeconomic and ethnic group. We were all once 18-22 and probably held at least some views we wouldn't agree with today; certainly we didn't know as much then as now. If people are being driven out of a classroom, as in some of the stories that have floated around, then it's an absolute failure on the part of the instructor.)

I agree with the general point expressed here about the difficulty of interpreting the Bible , but it's worth dwelling on because recognizing the existence of--let alone being able to identify or produce--different interpretations of a text is one of those sophisticating reading skills that even well-educated adults have a hard time mastering. One has to recognize the parts of the text that are "in play," which, as the example attests, includes the silences in the text, and then imagine the background assumptions and rhetorical techniques that are required to be able to produce an alternate reading. Then one actually has to produce an alternate reading. It's no surprise that many people go completely from one interpretation to another with little or no way-station in between.

When I was teaching, I used to exploit this for pedagogical ends. At Chicago, we would start out the year by reading the Republic, which is notable for the wide variety of ways people have understood it and which has some famously ambiguous passages. First assignments are tricky, because one wants to set the proper tone: this class will be neither easy nor impossible, but will require work. The last is especially important for people who feel that writing thesis-essays is easy either because they were able to produce consistently in high school, or they don't take non-scientific forms of study seriously. Thus, the assignment: take one of the famous (pre-selected) passages of the early books and give two interpretations of it. No need for introductions, thesis statements, or anything else: just two interpretations. The success rate was usually around 25%. This would lead to office hours where the other 75% of students would come to ask what was wrong. I'd ask them to put aside their papers and just explain to me the difference between their two interpretations, and most of those explanations would end with the student realizing they had just written the same interpretation twice. Somewhat chastened, they were ready to work more seriously.

That's the reality, I think: it's difficult enough to pass along one complete interpretation in all its nuances--and a liberal Protestant reading of the Bible is about nothing if not an endless series of nuances--for a book that is highlighted by changing narrative modes, genres, and rhetorical styles, all of which lays on top of the more fundamental question of how to read a book originally written for a different audience. I've come to think of the Bible as the easiest difficult book to read, or the most difficult easy book, for exactly this reason.

Duolingo

There is only one real regret I have from my undergrad educational experience, and that is not taking more Spanish than was absolutely necessary for me to get a degree, Michigan in its infinite wisdom requiring two years of foreign language to attain any degree other than General Studies. The years I took Spanish I mostly regretted not having chosen French instead. These days, of course, I read extensively in Spanish and Latin American literature, and must endure the frustrating experience of waiting for novels to be translated before I can read them.

I am also not, in general, a smartphone person; when I switched to iphone, I took off all the games. The phone exists for twitter and mgoblog, to call those members of my family who communicate primarily through the phone, find directions on the odd occasion we're lost, and settle disputes over factual matters (e.g. last night's debate about when Pixar hit its peak). I am also suspicious of the desire to 'game-ify' anything. I'm not short on the desire for self-improvement, nor on the ability to carry something out once I've committed to it. But I read a couple good things about Duolingo as a means to brush up on language skills, so I thought I'd give it a try.

The results, so far, are a qualified success. I retained a lot of Spanish, as it turns out, and the growth in my vocabulary since undergrad has made figuring out unknown words an easier process. The idea seems to be that working a combination of writing what is spoken out loud, speaking oneself, and translating to and from the language will allow people to expand their knowledge without consciously focusing on expanding that knowledge, without negotiating verb charts or phrase books. It has revealed to me certain areas where traditional language instruction put odd emphasis: I am so used to dealing with irregular verbs and nouns that take a different gender than the noun spelling suggests that I have had to adjust to the idea that most verbs are regular, etc. The ideal end result is an 'aha' moment, where you can translate to or from the language smoothly without quite having to think about it--you just sort of know what the answer is supposed to be.

It is not without its flaws: the difficulty I had in traditional language instruction keeping all the various past tenses straight continues, since they follow odd conjugation rules and are more frequently irregular. One makes progress, but slowly. And a greater amount of instruction is sometimes ideal: French is in certain respects a breeze (thanks to Latin and Spanish), but there are instances--articles and pronouns, in particular--where a chart that I could memorize would be tremendously helpful.

And, of course, none of this will stick unless I start regularly reading in each language. 

Architecures of Knowledge

I am occasionally asked whether or not it's a good idea to go to grad school. As a matter of objective facts, including salary and career prospects, it's hard to conclude that it is, or could be. If you go to graduate school in the social sciences or the humanities, you will be earning a very small amount of money for a (potentially) very long period of time, in order to become one of the 200+ who will be applying for whatever jobs there might be; four or five years of bouncing around temporary gigs and assembling what used to be a tenure-worthy cv will get your foot in the door. The sciences are better, to the extent that the funding is better and the programs (usually) are shorter. But the successful track to running a lab in, say, the biological sciences, requires at least one and more typically two post-docs, each of three to five years, much of which time will be devoted to writing grants and writing progress reports. Also there are fewer jobs than there were. Also the federal funding which provides for most basic science research is in jeopardy. Watching my friends in the sciences collectively realize this has been disciplinary schadenfreude only matched by watching them write their dissertations, which they initially cannot believe would take more than a couple weeks to pull together.

If I am asked, instead, whether I regret going to grad school, the answer has to be 'no': I met a number of interesting people, including my wife, got the chance to spend time reading, thinking, and writing about much of the stuff most interesting to me, and have an endless supply of anecdotes from my various experiences with teaching and administration.

The actual skill I gained that I think most worthwhile is in the architecture of knowledge. Research in the social sciences and the humanities is a matter of knowing how to phrase a question, and how to look for the answer. This gives me the ability to do astonishing things, like search for the universe of books and articles on a topic and identify which ones might be helpful; the ability to confirm that suspicion on approximately five minutes of reading, sometimes less; and find and digest what's useful in those results in a very limited amount of time. As it turns out, this is a useful skill in all parts of life: how do I know if this cookbook will be any good before I order it? How do I determine which of these potential pieces of furniture is the best value? How do I determine the best way to get from A to B in Durham's maze of streets? Figuring out where you are in a body of knowledge, analyzing what you find, synthesizing it into useable form: all of these make life a lot easier.

Explaining this to, say, undergraduates is quite difficult. On average, they're content to google their way to the answers to questions, accept wikipedia as a neutral and authoritative source, do the minimum amount of research for the assignment. I used to intentionally assign students to find more sources for a paper than were required for the final product, because you could see people prepared to ride or die with the first three, or five, or however many things they found. Discriminations of quality and usefulness were generally lost on them.

Which brings me to this commercial for google:



I think it's supposed to indicate to us how amazing google is at recognizing and answering our questions. A closer look at the result:

Google's great wisdom points us to an answer given by, italics required, mobile.omgfacts.com. Now, maybe omgfacts is a really great, reputable website; maybe their answer is correct. None of that should give any confidence at all that google will return a decent search result. If you're leaving the results of your search for an answer to google, or Amazon, or Facebook, or the local library search engine, you will get the results that someone else thinks best, and that someone is designing a search algorithm with goals that are unknown but not necessarily your own. If you don't know how to tell when an answer is wrong, how will you ever know that it's wrong?

Two interventions in the latest round of the CCOA debate. Tangential to that line of argument, and so here, not there.

1. Phoebe writes, in the comments: "If the entire system were to change, and everyone just went to the nearest state school, rather than to a school tailored to needs or preferences of students like them, then maybe we could have a conversation about what College consists of, down to the specific texts."

I find it interesting that these arguments are always at elite liberal arts colleges or Ivy League schools, and never (one MOOC revolt aside) at places like Virginia, UNC, or my alma mater, Michigan. Conservatives at Michigan would complain about the University-mandated Race and Ethnicity requirement, but mine was fulfilled learning about the treatment of the Irish by the British in the early 20th century, so it was kind of a hollow complaint. The reason is, largely, that once a university passes a certain size, it becomes logistically impossible--and kind of silly--to assume the purpose of a university education is unitary. Education then requires many departments with many professors, and so by definition a large number of successful paths. The intricacy of major requirements was usually tied to the size of the department, if only because it became difficult to ensure what classes might be available the larger (and thus more irregular) the department gets; the ability to specialize increases with departmental size. (A department with 50 professors each teaching (say) a 2-1 where half of them get to teach a course based on their research is likely to produce some questionable-seeming courses even if the curriculum as a whole is conventional.) If the scenario Phoebe envisions were to come to pass, I would expect this would make a conversation about what college consists of, down to the specific texts, impossible (this, of course, supports Phoebe's overall point).

And, goodness, class size: I took exactly five classes with fewer than 40 students: two sections of Spanish (at about 30), my two senior seminars in philosophy and political science, and one We Need a 400-level Course to Get Our Philosophy Degree. Seminar-style pedagogy is barely possible with the Chicago-mandated Core course size of 19: it is impossible above 40. As a teacher, your aims and outcomes need to be radically different, not least because the students have different expectations. There were 400 people in my Intro to Political Theory, 45-60 for my course on Dante, a similar number for my course on the Russian novel, near 100 for my British history in the 20th century courses, 45-60 in every art history course I took. There's less discussion, more lecturing, more emphasis on getting students to do synthetic work in papers and exams to demonstrate they have done some learning on their own, and professors tend to be thrilled to get students in office hours who just want to talk about their subjects. Come to think of it, the perfect conservative university education may be hiding at big state schools, even right now.

2. Having taught the Core-iest of social science Core courses, and having received my education from Michigan in what was a (voluntarily chosen!) classics-oriented manner, I am willing to venture the opinion that the second is superior to the first. The reason is simple: repetition. Approximately one year of exposure to the classics and then a conventional university education in another subject will not (necessarily) leave a student in a noticeably better place. Students tend to grasp Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Marx, only at the point the course moves on to another figure, and so what remains is rarely coherent and situated in the right context. The eventual result is, depending on the level of reference you prefer, the character in Balzac's Lost Illusions who likes to quote Ciceronian maxims to prove how educated he is, though he long ago forgot the context for any of them, or Father Guido Sarducci's Five-Minute University; the persistence of people who read Aristotle long ago and are positive they remember what he said is astounding. Reading Shakespeare, or Milton, or Aristotle, or Locke only once will rarely make much of an impact: reading it a number of times in different circumstances will. So apart from an attempt to mandate not just introductory course selection, but all course options, it seems like this will fail; and even if all course options were mandated, it'd still require the will of the individual student to make it work.

On Reading James Baldwin

At the end of the academic year, as a final reading for Classics of Social and Political Thought, I gave my students James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. There were a number of reasons for this: one of the climactic scenes takes place in Hyde Park, at a house they could easily walk to; it updates the conversation on race through the mid-60s, and gives them something newer than W.E.B. DuBois to think about; it allows them an option on racial questions that avoids lionizing Malcolm X or martyring Martin Luther King, both of which flatten the contradictions that make them interesting and admirable. Baldwin ends by conjuring up visions of black America on the south side of Chicago, and everywhere. His repeated line is "what happens to all that beauty?"--all those lives that are lost or forgotten.

I also assign it because I read it shortly after the end of my freshman year of college, and it had a profound effect on me. Baldwin came to me from Cornel West, who directed me to DuBois, and Malcolm X, and many of the other highlights of black American culture. I assigned it because I wanted it to have the effect on someone else that it had on me: a life-shaking realization of what the world was like for people who were not me. One might be inclined to view this as an example of thinking literature can change people: it certainly changed me. But, I have come to realize, it changed me because I was prepared to be changed.

Some relevant facts about me not otherwise known to the internet:
*From approximately 7th grade to approximately 10th grade, I was bullied. I've had a very slight sibilant S since childhood, which sounds not unlike a lisp, on occasion. I was tall and skinny and not particularly interested in sports or cars; I liked to read. This made me a target, and the epithets of choice implied homosexuality. These threats were mostly that--threats--except for a few brief incidents. But the threat of violence is psychologically damaging in its own way. Sure, the kids in the pickup truck who stopped as I was walking down the street to yell "fag!" at me were probably not going to get out of said truck and make good on their threats, but probabilistic knowledge is cold comfort. I had some small consolation in the fact that the basis of their threats was untrue and, lo and behold, the threats dried up not soon after I started dating my first girlfriend, but there's something about knowing you might be subject to violence for no reason under your control that's hard to shake.
*From 10th grade or so until my sophomore year of college, I had long hair. I have been stopped and frisked by the police for the crime of sitting on a friend's car (and been singled out from the people I was with for that honor), and been frustrated by the indifference that attached to attempting to report someone's official misbehavior--city and state police shuttled me back and forth so many times, each denying responsibility, that I eventually gave up. I've had the experience of store owners send employees around to follow me and make sure I don't shoplift or otherwise cause trouble (and make sure I saw them so I knew it was intentional). When I took introductory philosophy as a freshman, the instructor asked if any of us had this particular experience--the only other one to raise her hand was the one person of color.

My experience was not the universe of experiences: I was only subject to force, never viewed as a threat. It was limited: only a few minutes or hours or random days through a small number of years. It also no longer applies: I look like the sort of person who gets called 'sir' when I wear a suit, and I do. (I additionally had the defiant-teen's ultimate defense, that the various charges stated or implied against me weren't true)

But I think about that radical element that's always been present in my political views, the way in which it was obvious to me that Baldwin was right, that the experience Malcolm X described actually happened, that Ralph Ellison had correctly apprehended both the white and black experience of racial interaction, and it becomes apparent that I responded to all that work because I was primed to recognize the truth in it. The victory it gives is minor: I'm not sure I'm a better person for having read it, though it does make one more aware of the ways in which one falls short, not an insignificant addition. You pick Baldwin because he recognizes all of it, including the continual struggle to be slightly better. It's hard to think of a more fitting task to direct people towards when they're young.

"Go Slow"

The oddest thing about teaching Classics of Social and Political Thought this past year was the students' attitude towards racism and sexism. To their minds, both were deeply-seated problems and would take a long time to resolve. One student thought Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation" was a 21st century piece, rather than one written at the turn of the 20th century; they noted the similarities between Tocqueville or DuBois' observations on the treatment of black people. They took to heart Tocqueville's idea that society doesn't change until mores change, and mores take a long time to change, but they did so in the oddest of ways: by assuming this gets everyone in history, and themselves, off the hook. Changing attitudes is complex, and people can't do it overnight.

Raising the issue of justice rarely helped, as their tendency was to think in terms of efficiency and ease. Justice being neither efficient nor easy, they looked on this as a needless muddying of the waters. I offered the comparison with homophobia, which they all think untenable, and pointed out that American society has reversed itself on the question within the last 20 years. No effect. Even pointing out that racism or sexism is just a choice--one that can be undone with so little effort as 'now I'm going to treat this person like a person, as I do every day with lots of human beings I encounter'--did not dissuade them from the idea that these problems would take hundreds of years to solve. I found their position disturbing because of the quietism it seems to imply--that political and social conditions are a given, that individual effort matters very little, that the resolution of problems is largely out of their hands and is somewhere far off in the future. And I am not quite sure how to address it in the future.

This, incidentally, was my model in college: take required courses for the major I wanted, and then take other courses as broadly as possible in things I thought might be interesting; this is why I ended up a course shy of a minor in History of Art. And I even managed to do it at a major state university!

Flavia writes about the interesting complications of teaching two sections of the same class:

But there are also ways in which teaching two sections of the same class can keep one on one's toes. It's fun to see what two different groups of students will respond to in a given scene, and sometimes the readings go in interestingly different directions. It's also fun, in a way, to try to maintain the integrity of my lesson plan--which is to say, to make sure I hit a few of the same major points--in classes that may have wildly different interests or that move unevenly through the same material: one of my classes is always running long, which means I usually have to cut or summarize on the fly, while the other class often runs a little short and so gets spontaneous additional discussion. I like the puzzle-solving element of that: trying to keep both on the same reading schedule, covering the same big ideas, while responding to whatever arises organically in each one.

I've been doing this all year, and would have been flummoxed by it had I not been given the following piece of advice by both my old dissertation advisor and a professor at my current institution (both of whom, oddly, have firsthand knowledge of this). Teaching two sections of the same course back to back* is like have non-identical twins: no matter how much they might seem alike, and no matter how much you want to treat them exactly the same way, you have to recognize that they're different and have to be approached that way, even if they sometimes seem uncannily like each other.


*In my grad school days, I would TA two discussion sections, though never back-to-back, without this difficulty. I think in part it's that they weren't back to back, which heightens the oddness of repeating yourself or trying to avoid repeating yourself. It's also that the material was set for me from on high, i.e. the professor teaching the course, and so I was consequently less reflective on the pedagogical challenges involved. If it didn't go successfully in one class, I was liable to chalk that up to the professor's instructions.

I am now teaching John Locke. Ostensibly, this should be one of the easier parts of the term: give them a bit of the First Treatise to make them appreciate the fine snark factory Locke could be when he wanted, and then move on to that font of the American Revolution, the Second Treatise. In practice, it's much more difficult than anything else in the sequence. No one, more than Locke, will write things which appear intuitive, obvious, and incapable of being adequately responded to. Pedagogically, this is not ideal. It also induces in me the tendency to think that there must be something wrong with that which is easily embraced by others--an instinct that, in this instance, is pedagogically helpful, since it helps concentrate my reading and teaching on the strongest possible objections to Locke's argument.

What stands out for me this time around is the centrality of rhetoric and the fiction of consent. Hobbes and Locke are both concerned with naming things properly according to a geometrical scheme that will allow conclusions to follow as in a mathematical proof. It's evident in Hobbes that this naming is in fact a form of re-naming, since a number of his definitions don't accord with common usage, but it's also true of Locke. The liberal project, for everything that is good and beneficial about it, does occasionally seem to be no more than fancy dress whose purpose is to disguise that centralized liberal (and eventually democratic) states are tremendously more powerful than the monarchical states they are replacing.* Worse, that power is more diffuse and harder to identify.**

Which brings us to Rod Dreher. One might think that this skepticism about the liberal project entails a conservatism that focuses on the importance of intermediate institutions to protect individuals against the state. Except, as it turns out, those institutions are subject to their own logic of preservation, which no less depends on disguising the reality of the power they hold. Thus, in the same day, Rod can mention actual problems with the function of Wall Street firms and the abuse crisis in the Catholic church and be describing the same thing in both cases: institutions take on a logic, and this logic is concerned more with self-perpetuation than anything else, no matter what the rhetoric might be. So it would appear, then, that the proper position if rhetoric is a problem is libertarianism: a moderate and reasonable skepticism about the claims to virtue of any institution.

And yet: the liberal state really is better than the monarchical state it replaces; firms and churches do actually do some good in the world.


*See, for example, criticism over the leaked White Paper on targeted killings, which, like the previous Administration's work on torture, appears to be a case of altering the meanings of words to the breaking point in order to justify an illiberal policy.

**(Filmer, for all his faults, at least thinks that power is one thing every time it appears in the world; Locke maintains that the nature of (legitimate) power differs depending on who is involved. On the one hand that seems truer, and on the other hand it seems to make it more difficult to answer his own central question: who has power?)

This is what I think of whenever I write an essay prompt. From the Paris Review:

Interviewer: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Dorothy Parker: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

The latest paper prompt is sitting at twelve words (I don't like to fuss with extra: each word should do the work of explaining what the essay is to be about), one of which took about 45 minutes to pick out (it must gesture in the direction of the answers I would like to get without tipping the balance of them one way or the other, as a few of the discarded words would have done), and the last three representing two different terms I cannot decide between.

Norm's story here is, I think, a modest argument in favor of the fourth year of college instruction and/or the presence of some required distribution of courses prior to the requirement to choose a major: both provide more time to 'try on' different options with lower stakes. I am certain I will have more definite opinions on this once I have taught in the Core here at Chicago for longer. (I do, however, think the average undergraduate curriculum could probably use more, not less, classroom time to major in a subject, especially where the general education requirements are lower. Philosophy at Michigan had a very structured curriculum for majors and possibly even a higher overall hour-requirement, and was accordingly more systematic and useful than even political science. For me, its use was convincing me that I didn't want to be a philosopher, but that's still a use.)

I consider Alan Jacobs' point about the manner in which survey responses are scored as 'correct' or 'incorrect' to reveal two facts. The first, which Jacobs notes, is that the usual belief that Americans are poorly informed on basic facts about political structures, etc, is wrong: people know the important things tolerably well. What they don't know is the precise terminology for these things (a point that applies to the people scoring the surveys just as much as the people answering them). The second point is then that mastery of particular knowledge that is difficult, but rather the ability to take a lot of information and discern its structure. In grad school, I had a professor argue very convincingly that this was the real advantage possessed by academics who teach in the humanities and the social sciences. If the comparative advantage which provides a reason to hire and retain you is that you know what it says in Book V of the Republic, you can be replaced by Wikipedia. Mastery of the web of allusions, references, and analogies in the politics of that day and the present day, the ability to distinguish the important and central from the accidental, the ability to see implications of word choice and positions: that's the hard thing to learn. And so in one sense you teach not so much the information, but a range of things that can be done with it.

Today in teaching: students were remarkably unperturbed that Socrates' favored metaphor for the soldiers responsible for defending the city is "dog." After much coaxing, only one student was willing to suggest that perhaps expecting a human being to act like an animal isn't the best possible thing.

Also, one student suggested that dogs were an apt metaphor since they protect their owners and their possessions and defend against intruders. Naturally, I rejoindered with a mention of dog-shaming.com. I neglected to mention any of Everybody's Favorite Shiba Inu's exploits, though one almost did end up being submitted.

The comments here go pretty much the way you might expect them to. Perhaps it's that I'm teaching Plato and so the insufficiency of all knowledge is prominent in my mind, but I will take occasion to note how utterly strange it is to me that on both religion and politics, people seem to have no problem believing that they had it all figured out at 15, and that at such a precocious age they encountered all possible arguments so as to render follow-up on either topic a waste of time. Especially so, since it's a belief that many of these people would find damning in other fields: if one's favorite book at 30 is the same as one's favorite book at 15, then one clearly hasn't read enough, or it will be taken as a sign of immaturity of judgment. The ability to charitably and regularly take on strong articulations of a view with which you differ is a basic condition for being a serious interlocutor in any conversations at all. (I mean, goodness: this is the base-line condition for academic research.)

The first assignment that I'm giving my students this term is a straightforward one, but I also hope that it's a profoundly difficult one: give two interpretations for one ten-line-ish passage of the Republic. The idea is that it's a sign of sophistication and adult maturity to be able to put on other minds, to see from perspectives other than one's own. The point is not so much to drive them to see endless interpretive possibilities in a text (which is not a position I agree with or would argue for) so much as to get them to recognize that other possibilities exist at all.

If there's one major difference between myself as an instructor now and when I first started out (there are, in fact, several), it's that I have become increasingly good at staying out of interesting classroom discussions as they are happening.

Class yesterday was Book I of the Republic, which is one of those texts that will be immediately engaging to anyone with the slightest interest in political theory. It also has a lot going on in the text, so there are a number of different ways the discussion can go. I'm having the students sign up to begin class once over the course of the term, and the student who did so yesterday started with one of the broadest possible questions: which of the three theories of justice presented is best? And... they wanted to talk about it. So I let them, for about 40 minutes out of 80, before making sure we covered everything and not just what they wanted to talk about. I would interject occasionally to add a clarification or re-direct a comment, but that was pretty much it; they were discussing the important substantive issues, but in their own particular way. At 40 minutes, I blew their minds by suggesting they were not necessarily supposed to agree with Socrates (one student literally said something like "oh s***" when I said that).

That's something that would never have occurred to me as a grad student: texts, back then, were dense webs of ideas and associations which it was very important to get just right, and, consequently, discussions had to be keyed on forcing students to recognize these distinctions. This goes over poorly in introductory classes, because the last thing students who already doubt the utility of political theory want is to be told that it's too complicated for them to understand. Now I want them, especially at the beginning, to understand that there's something at stake in all these questions, and that they can be interesting and strange and (sometimes) thrilling to argue about. But, rather than determining what they will find interesting (of which at 30 I have, at best, a slight idea; so much the worse for me when I'm older), I'd rather have them lead me to it. One good discussion at the beginning will buy a lot of goodwill in the future when things might be more difficult. (Aquinas, I'm looking at you.)

I will be following this with interest, as someone who taught freshmen last year and will be teaching them again this year (probably exclusively). Even very academically talented freshmen at top universities don't know how to write--or don't know how to control their writing--and the easiest way to get them to improve is to require them to write all the time.

Filing these sentences away as an example for students of particularly bad writing:

"While a number of factors contribute to lower accident rates, including increased helmet usage and more bike lanes, less aggressive bicyclists probably helped, too. Despite such statistics, lots of drivers assume all people on bikes are assholes like me."

A fine example of arguing through adjectives, and of how the unwillingness to be precise and bring up evidence makes it sound like you don't know anything. Translation: I have no specific support for the idea that this is true, but I want to write on this topic anyway.