catachresis
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2004
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I'm thick into the last throes of grading end-of-term composition papers. I teach the second stage of English Composition--the one where I'm supposed to take off the training wheels and get everybody to analyze arguments. This is hard for most students. Even the students who are up for it are often testosterone-combusting geeks. Of course, in nearly every class there's an older student, or an especially well-trained student who is stepping in an orderly fashion through the BSC into Med School. She writes more measured, more considerate, and better articulated (perhaps) essays than I.
But there are quite a few students--they're required to write analyses of opposing opinions on a controversial issue towards the end of the course--who *alarm me*, or *make me very worried*, or, more frankly, scare the bejeezus out of me because they are not only hard-core ideologues, but they can't even fathom that they *are* dyed-in-the-wool inveterate ideologues.
Premise: I teach a course on different approaches to argumentation. These include propositional logic, standards of empirical evidence, critique of ideological context, and good-old-fashion Aristotelian play with the old rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos, and logos. I'll even dash in a bit of 18th-century skepticism/ post-War Deconstruction to be the Devil's advocate and keep the alert but complacent better students hopping. A required course on the argumentative essay--that's what they sign-up for.
And yet I have ostensibly alert, middle-class students who have stared at me and said things like, "What do you expect. You can't change what somebody believes."
A few years ago, the more refractory students identified themselves with the hip-hop critique of bourgeois America, and I was cool with that, with the exception that I was a White college instructor and therefore a primary hegemon of the ******** coming down from the oppressor race. I'd say, "Fair dues--fair dues. . . " and try to talk about basic tenants of class warfare, or even the ideological history of the post-bellum Deep South. They just hung onto the who anti-intellectual resistance to discourse that evinced the fact that they were "keeping it real." I didn't make any progress with that stance and just had to take my lumps. And really, just about the time that Fiddy Cent was saying "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," Dick Chaney and Tom DeLay were advocating the same simplified Darwinian ethos for everybody who reads US News and World Report. Even Jesus perked up enough to rewrite the New Testament with the Prosperity Gospel.
Anyhow, none of my Black students are claiming to keep it real any longer. Everybody is grinding for that elusive future job in the service industry. But the White students I've got now just take the cake--and all of the candy as well. I just graded a final essay in which a woman explained that not only should abortion be treated as a form of "elective surgery," but the law should account it no more important to women's health care than is a "tummy-tuck." Indeed, she seemed to imply that she'd support the necessity of federally funding the coverage of botox injections and breast enlargement for Charro over permitting any insurance policy to partially cover abortion. I'm not saying that I'm a great advocate of abortion, but I'm not a reductive, simplistic dismisser of its potential legitimacy either.
And the student didn't even bother to actually pull out a full-fledged analysis that would have offered some sort of rational grounds for the stance. Instead, she found two guys who were pontificating on Helium.com to be her credible sources, and she read off the "talking-notes" teleprompter. Implicitly, she suggested that truth itself was something that was now decided by plebiscite--like the winners of Dancing with the Stars. If the vocal and voting majority believe that girls with epilepsy are possessed by Satan, or that the President is Hitler and Mao at the same time, or that, basically, poor people get what they get because that's what they deserve, and poverty is God's special way of advertising that the punishments wreaked upon the unrighteous are justified by their sin, just as the fortunes acquired by the local CEO of the State Health HMO--recently indited for corruption--are proof of his godly election, and I'm supposed to take all of these verities as being impervious to any reasoned argument--then I want to be transferred to the Intro to Creative Writing Class where we write poems about the special magical qualities of rainbows, unicorns, and BFFs.
Thanks for letting me rant. I know that this post will be gone in ten minutes. Respects to the Mod. I'm off to grade a few more essays before bed.
But there are quite a few students--they're required to write analyses of opposing opinions on a controversial issue towards the end of the course--who *alarm me*, or *make me very worried*, or, more frankly, scare the bejeezus out of me because they are not only hard-core ideologues, but they can't even fathom that they *are* dyed-in-the-wool inveterate ideologues.
Premise: I teach a course on different approaches to argumentation. These include propositional logic, standards of empirical evidence, critique of ideological context, and good-old-fashion Aristotelian play with the old rhetorical triangle of ethos, pathos, and logos. I'll even dash in a bit of 18th-century skepticism/ post-War Deconstruction to be the Devil's advocate and keep the alert but complacent better students hopping. A required course on the argumentative essay--that's what they sign-up for.
And yet I have ostensibly alert, middle-class students who have stared at me and said things like, "What do you expect. You can't change what somebody believes."
A few years ago, the more refractory students identified themselves with the hip-hop critique of bourgeois America, and I was cool with that, with the exception that I was a White college instructor and therefore a primary hegemon of the ******** coming down from the oppressor race. I'd say, "Fair dues--fair dues. . . " and try to talk about basic tenants of class warfare, or even the ideological history of the post-bellum Deep South. They just hung onto the who anti-intellectual resistance to discourse that evinced the fact that they were "keeping it real." I didn't make any progress with that stance and just had to take my lumps. And really, just about the time that Fiddy Cent was saying "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," Dick Chaney and Tom DeLay were advocating the same simplified Darwinian ethos for everybody who reads US News and World Report. Even Jesus perked up enough to rewrite the New Testament with the Prosperity Gospel.
Anyhow, none of my Black students are claiming to keep it real any longer. Everybody is grinding for that elusive future job in the service industry. But the White students I've got now just take the cake--and all of the candy as well. I just graded a final essay in which a woman explained that not only should abortion be treated as a form of "elective surgery," but the law should account it no more important to women's health care than is a "tummy-tuck." Indeed, she seemed to imply that she'd support the necessity of federally funding the coverage of botox injections and breast enlargement for Charro over permitting any insurance policy to partially cover abortion. I'm not saying that I'm a great advocate of abortion, but I'm not a reductive, simplistic dismisser of its potential legitimacy either.
And the student didn't even bother to actually pull out a full-fledged analysis that would have offered some sort of rational grounds for the stance. Instead, she found two guys who were pontificating on Helium.com to be her credible sources, and she read off the "talking-notes" teleprompter. Implicitly, she suggested that truth itself was something that was now decided by plebiscite--like the winners of Dancing with the Stars. If the vocal and voting majority believe that girls with epilepsy are possessed by Satan, or that the President is Hitler and Mao at the same time, or that, basically, poor people get what they get because that's what they deserve, and poverty is God's special way of advertising that the punishments wreaked upon the unrighteous are justified by their sin, just as the fortunes acquired by the local CEO of the State Health HMO--recently indited for corruption--are proof of his godly election, and I'm supposed to take all of these verities as being impervious to any reasoned argument--then I want to be transferred to the Intro to Creative Writing Class where we write poems about the special magical qualities of rainbows, unicorns, and BFFs.
Thanks for letting me rant. I know that this post will be gone in ten minutes. Respects to the Mod. I'm off to grade a few more essays before bed.
