Intensity

As readers of this blog know (when it was active as many as a five of you), I frequently bemoan the ubiquitous use of the depth/surface distinction (and its kin: real/fake, natural/artificial) in public life. This goes back, as much does, to Plato's Socrates's distinction, for instance in the Gorgias, between true arts such as medicine and false arts such as cosmetics. In contemporary life, we have superficial changes and superficial policies and superficial responses. They don't really do anything; they just appear to.

I get it. I am often with those that make such criticisms. There is obviously a difference between adding a sign to a store's front door and changing the store policy inside. If the door says "No Shirt. No Shoes. No Service" and yet I am never removed from the store when I am barefoot and bare-chested, then it makes sense to remark that something is off here--that no real change has taken place.

However, I'd like to imagine other ways of addressing this kind of disconnect without relying on the surface/depth superficial/real distinctions. My "for instance" here would be the notion of intensity. Rather than working from the binary of the "superficial" and the "real" (in part because even a "superficial" change is a "real" change), we can describe changes, policies, responses, etc. as more or less intense. Changing the sign on the door but not the treatment of the shirtless customer inside would no longer simply by superficial but only less intense. I think intensity nicely calls attention to the qualitative rather than quantitative differences in enactment and effect. Telling some to stop, yelling at someone to stopping, and physically intercepting someone are not in different categories (superficial and real) but rather register different levels of intensity, and, depending on the context, effectiveness.

It's something I have been thinking about lately, and hope to think more about soon.

Hot Dog!

I happen to be a big fan of hot dogs. I am, you might say, a connoisseur of hot dogs. This is, I'll admit, not something to brag about. But it is as good a way as any to begin a short blog post about rhetoric and taste.

There are numerous studies (I am working on compiling a list) centered around how perceptions other than the sense of taste impacts taste itself. For, instance, beer taste tests that indicate people who swear by one brand of beer are unable to to pick that beer out from its competitors. The argument, then, is that, for instance, Miller Lite, Bud Lite, and Coors Lite all really taste the same. There are likewise instances, for my more sophisticated readers, of wine drinkers being unable to tell the difference between red and white wine when it was served in opaque glasses. The typical narrative in these studies is that "taste" as we commonly know it is simply an illusion. There is no real; only those differences created by our knowledge of brands, or our knowledge of something's color. This knowledge then colors our taste of whatever it is we are consuming. Your favorite beer isn't really any different than someone else's beer--you have just been tricked into believing so.

I often have to fight this reaction myself, as I imagine the many times in grad school I had to defend myself against the refined pallets of my more well-traveled and sophisticated colleagues. Of course, the food at that restaurant is better--you went there already believing it would be. "Admit that your food is not really any better than mine but that your own expectations are part of the taste of the food."

But this urge, I argue, must be resisted (not because they were right and I was wrong) for two reasons: 1) everybody's tastes appear to work this way, and, 2) we need to reassess the materiality and rhetoricity of taste itself. Not that taste has been revealed as a hoax, but that taste has always already been multiple-sensual, contextual, and contingent. Is it crazy to assume that sight can be as important to taste as we would acknowledge that smell is? Why would we dismiss our predispositions and biases when describing taste: isn't a bias also an expertise? That is, no one would argue that someone who has never tasted wine is a better judge of a wine's true or pure taste than someone who has much experience. Unless, of course, you are Burger King:



It is precisely the bias of judges that makes them, we might argue (without sounding like Hume, mind you), better able to assess the taste of the wine. Honestly, I don't care what someone who has never tasted a hamburger thinks is a better hamburger. I have tasted hamburgers. I want to know what this guy thinks of hamburgers:



I would go so far as to argue that without bias there is no taste. This is not to argue something like "social construction" with respect to taste. There is something material about taste. I probably can't talk myself into preferring dirty dish water as a seasoning. Although, I might talk myself out of caring if I was hungry (and it was a hot dog).

I Write Like...

Apparently, the prose on this blog reads like David Foster Wallace (and I submitted a couple of different chunks). Interestingly enough, a sample from a journal article I wrote reads like James Joyce, which may not be the best result.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

My Dream Student

So, over at Both Wearing Black Masks there has been a post or two about "My Ideal Student." Here is mine:

Writing in the Disciplines, Disciplinarity, and Threshold Concepts

Here is a bit a text I am working on as part of my participation in Thresholds of Writing, "a multi-year initiative to study and transform the way we teach writing as an integral part of a liberal education in the 21st century." We are holding a colloquium with faculty across the college, and we will soon be discussing "reflections" as a pedagogical tool. This bit of text is designed to place the practice of reflections within the broader concept of writing in the disciplines, disciplinarity itself, and threshold concepts. For the uninitiated, threshold concepts, drawn from theorists Jan Meyer and Ray Land can be defined as,

an approach to disciplinary thinking that proposes there are certain foundational ideas that serve as gateways to subjects that students must understand in order to progress in that field. These thresholds are more than just core concepts but often serve an integrative function within fields.

One of the primary goals for the project is to promote writing as a way for students to move through such threshold concepts on their way into their discipline.

Here is what I have so far:

As we talk together of writing, we necessarily confront our disciplinary differences and similarities: what about writing can we agree upon and what about writing in our own disciplines creates unique challenges and opportunities. Likewise, the interdisciplinartity effort of fostering writing in the disciplines necessarily involves a discussion of threshold concepts: what are the defining portals (or ways) into our disciplines that constitute them as unique. As portals they must be somewhere along the walls around our fields of study.

In light of this double move, we would like to suggest that thresholds of writing serves as a catalyst for writing in the disciplines, which brings into sharp relief the boundaries of those disciplines and then discovers those boundaries as threshold concepts. Thus, we as a colloquium enact this coming-to-thresholds-through-writing in much the same way we hope our students might. In having to articulate what exactly we do, what makes us different, and what difference those differences make we come to articulate our threshold concepts. As we have discussed, and as Randy Bass has explored in his work on visible knowledge, we must be able to articulate the threshold concepts of our disciplines if we are to have any hope of bringing students through those very portals.

This moves us then to reflection. We see reflection enacted in a variety of ways, places, and times depending upon the discipline and the task at hand. Students can be asked to reflect upon the significance and implications of a philosophical text, they can be ask to describe and justify rhetorical moves made in a set of technical instructions, or they can be asked to articulate their methods and discuss the results of an experiment in a lab report. Reflection need not be soft, holistic, and after the fact; it can be down and dirty and in media res. In can be a highly detailed post mortem or brief cover memo attached to an assignment.

Reflections can also reveal a student’s struggle with threshold concepts. A student who is unable to articulate a choice he has made with respect to word choice or document design is a student not yet through one of the key thresholds of rhetorical activity. A student who can describe the procedure of an experiment while being unable to explain how the process works or the experimental design itself, maybe struggling with troublesome knowledge and a threshold concept. Reflection need not be extra work for either students or teachers when made part and parcel of the task. Reflections so integrated do not necessarily add work; they might, in fact, make less work for teacher and student by demystifying the aspects of the course, materials, or discipline students struggle with.

As a colloquium, our emphasis on writing stresses its inventional qualities. That is, writing is not simply (or only) the communication, transmission, or delivery of information. Writing is itself a coming-to-know and the chief method we have for generating ideas. Reflections should be no different. Ostensibly about describing work in progress or products completed, reflections are likewise places to generate new ideas, new processes, and new ways forward. More specifically, for students and teachers reflections can become a way to grapple with troublesome knowledge and invent ways to move productively through thresholds to become scholars deeply integrated in the values and methods of a discipline.

Day 17: Closing Ceremonies (Part 1)

Earlier in the week I posted this conversation about the medal count that I had with my German Friend. I would like, as part of my own closing ceremonies, to make a few remarks on the medal count.

The U.S. has won the total medal count with 37, followed by the Germans with 30 and the Canadians with 26. In terms of gold medals, the Canadians come out on top with 14, followed by the Germans with 10 and the U.S. with 9. Now, many favor the gold medal count as the preferred measure for Olympic success. And, I will not deny that this measure has merit. For instance, it acknowledges that silver and bronze medals are not the same as gold medals. It is not, however, the only one, and my reasons for problematizing it are not, strictly speaking, biased (at least in terms of patriotism). I would like to suggest a few other measures and offer reasons for their value over the "Gold only" measure.

1. Total Medals. We should recall that until very recently both summer and winter games were contested in the same calendar year. I would thus argue that for total medals we should combine this year's Winter Olympics with the 2008 Summer Olympics (we could, or course, wait until the 2012 London Summer Games). Doing that we come up with the following totals:

   U.S.A.: 45 / 53 / 49 // 147
   China: 56 / 23 / 32 // 111
   Russia: 26 / 26 / 3 // 87
   Germany: 26 / 23 / 22 // 71
   South Korea: 19 / 16 / 10 // 45
   Canada: 17 / 16 / 11 // 44

   We see that China leads overall in gold medals, but the U.S.A has a clear lead in overall medals. I would also add that no other nation is as balanced in terms of representation in the medals for both the Summer and Winter games. Russia and Germany are close, but nowhere near as dominant in both Olympics.


2. Total Points. Another measure, and one that gives full due to all medal winners, which the "Gold only" argument does not, is to award values to medals and combine those totals (i.e., 3 points for gold, two for silver, and one for bronze). For this year's Winter Olympics it works out this way:

   U.S.A.: 68 points
   Germany: 63 points
   Canada: 58 points

   
   For both the 2008 Summer and 2010 Winter Olympics we have the following totals

   U.S.A.: 290 points
   China: 246 points
   Russia: 165 points
   Germany: 146 points
   South Korea: 99 points
   Canada: 94 points

While, for personal reasons, I might prefer the total medal count translated into points, the larger point is that there are multiple ways of assessing the games. I prefer this last way of accounting because it counts silver and bronze medals without making them equal to gold medals, which addresses one of the reasons I feel the "Gold only" assessment method is preferred. It also highlights consistency and excellence across the entire Olympic spectrum. Clearly, one could use another measure when and where appropriate (e.g. if one wanted to make geographical claims). I make the following range of assessments available to suggest the need for alternatives and to contextualize these now completed 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Day 13: If Students Were Olympians

Listening to Olympic athletes describe their failures compels me to confront my goals and expectations for my students. Many of the athletes I have heard in post-game interviews are quite frank about their failures. However, it is not their frankness itself which impresses me. What impresses me is their ability to breakdown their process: to the steps they took or didn't take, the moves they made or didn't made, and how the combined effect of those steps and missteps, moves and mistakes resulted in their "failure." For these athletes, failure is not absence (or presence) of one thing or another, but is, more often than not, a failure to execute specific actions. Rarely have I heard "I don't have the talent." You hear, instead, "I didn't do what I needed to do."

As I have already opined, there are many aspects of athletics I would import to the classroom. However, in many regards I am talking about what the space of athletics affords that the classroom may not.

I think students often suffer under the assumption that intelligence is a possession rather than an activity (although we do suffer under the notion of talent in athletics as well). And while there are certain baseline cognitive requirements for intelligence, cognition is highly plastic and largely cultivated through practice (I here draw on the work of Andy Clark). As many educators would attest to (I hope), student failure is often not because they lack something. Failure results from not executing specific actions in time. A failure to study in advance of the exam. A failure to develop study habits to effectively utilize study time. A failure to prepare a proper area in which to study. These are all activities that "result" in what we objectify as "intelligence." And as much as teachers focus on activity and the steps students much take, our societal assumptions about "intelligence" often make this an uphill battle.

Day 10: Olympic Assessment

As both U.S.A. curling teams flounder at the Vancouver Games, I feel obliged to briefly address assessment (athletic, pedagogical, or otherwise). According to curling legend and NBC commentator Don Duguid, the men's curling team was the forth ranked team in the United States when they won the U.S. Olympic trials. That is, over the previous season, there were three "better" teams in the U.S. However, because "better" is assessed in terms of Olympic trial tournaments, America is represented, in many sports, by those athletes that won the last tournament just prior to the Olympics.

I do not intend to dismiss this means of assessment out of hand. In many ways it is fair. I can imagine all sorts of problems that might emerge if a committee selected the representatives. Any assessment method necessarily selects its measures and deflects others. And assessment, in sports and beyond, is necessarily complex because no one measure accounts for everything. In the moment of decision and in order to decide at all we must pick one way of picking.

However, it is becoming clear, at least to me, that the U.S. curling team isn't just a unfortunate team on a cold streak; they seem genuinely out-matched by nearly all of their competitors. Sure, many of the matches have been tight, but I have seen no other team miss as many shots (and I have watched way too much curling at this point). And so we must reconsider, or should at least consider at all, how this particular squad of curlers has come to represent the U.S. of A.

And so here is my critique of the tournament-style assessment measure: it is predicated, in part, on a desire to have a undisputed representative. It is a way of choosing that appears the least like a choice. "Look, we lined everybody up and they ran to the finish line. The first one there was the winner. It's completely objective." Except, of course, it isn't. Choosing the tournament as the means to select an Olympic team is already a value. And, as a said earlier, it is a reasonable one. It is a value and a choice, however, that erases history and reputation and unduly reduces complexity. It rewards what one team has done in one tournament, and not what one team has done over a longer time frame (over more series of moments), which is, I'll admit, a trickier, a messier, and (most likely) a more contestable measure.

But in this moment it is safe to say that U.S.A. Curling couldn't have done much worse.