“Was Wittgenstein Right?”

The philosopher Paul Horwich on Ludwig Wittgenstein:

[T]he usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Was Wittgenstein Right? (New York Times)

[It must be a good thing I didn’t go to graduate school in philosophy: Wittgenstein is one of the key figures in the life of my mind.]

National Grammar Day

“There is so much to celebrate about our language. English may be a shifty whore, but she’s our shifty whore. Please, this National Grammar Day, don’t turn her into a bully, too”: A Plea for Sanity this National (US) Grammar Day.

No more homework

[From a found notebook.]

I spent four years in college without doing homework. Which is not to say I slacked: to the contrary. But the word homework played no part in my effort. What I “did” instead: I read, mostly books, and I wrote papers. I never had homework: I had reading, or a lot of reading, or a ton of reading. And papers, short and long. If one of my professors had ever announced that there was homework, I would have cringed. And I can say with some confidence that I never heard a fellow student use the word.

And as a college prof, I never speak of homework. But I hear the word often, spoken by students. Try a Twitter search for college and homework: they’re often found together. One college student tweets, in a lovely mixed metaphor, of being “shackled by piles of homework.” My case against the word has nothing to do with snobbery, nothing to do with an inflated sense of my dignity. Homework is not beneath me. But the word has, to my mind, little or nothing to do with college.

For one thing, homework suggests a world divided between school and family, a distinction not always in play in college, when many students are living away from home. There’s something incongruous about the idea of taking homework back to a dorm or an off-campus apartment. There’s something even more incongruous about the idea of a non-traditional (older) student doing homework. The word also suggests that there will be something to turn in, something for a teacher to “collect,” though the day-to-day work of reading and note-taking in a college class typically yields nothing for a second party to look at. And the word homework carries at least a suggestion of teacherly whims, particularly for children who might already be spending a good part of the school day plugging away at worksheets.¹ Will the teacher be piling it on tonight, or giving everyone a break? In a college class though, where a semester’s work is mapped out in advance, there will always already be something to do between class meetings — or at least there should be.

There are many other ways in which the experience of college can be improved—by requiring, for instance, significant reading and writing in classes. But it might be easier to regard such work as a norm (and not an anomaly) if one were to dispose of the word homework: not “I have forty pages of homework” but “I have forty pages of reading.” Traditional-aged college students are novice adults, men and women in the making. They—and their older fellow students—would do well to think of their coursework, whatever it might require, in terms beyond those of elementary and secondary education.

¹ The Oxford English Dictionary gives this earliest (1662) meaning of the word: “Work done at home, esp. as distinguished from work done in a factory.”

[About the notebook: a friend found it years ago, abandoned. Its pages were blank, except for the note above. I sometimes wonder what became of the writer.]

Cheating in online courses

Every breath you take, every move you make: New Technologies Aim to Foil Online Course Cheating (New York Times).

Related reading
All cheating posts (Pinboard)

A multiple-choice question

If education must be reduced to standardized tests, we should ask John Ashbery to write the questions:


John Ashbery, from 100 Multiple-Choice Questions (New York and Boston: Adventures in Poetry, 2001).

Related reading
All John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”

“Warnings from the Trenches”

A retired high-school teacher tells college professors what to expect in the wake of No Child Left Behind:

We entered teaching because we wanted to make a difference in the lives of the students who passed through our classrooms. Many of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the policies already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are increasingly restricted in how and what we teach.

Now you are seeing the results in the students arriving at your institutions. They may be very bright. But we have not been able to prepare them for the kind of intellectual work that you have every right to expect of them. It is for this that I apologize, even as I know in my heart that there was little more I could have done. Which is one reason I am no longer in the classroom.

Kenneth Bernstein, “Warnings from the Trenches” (Academe)

As Bernstein points out, students of traditional age who entered college in Fall 2012 experienced the full force of No Child Left Behind, from third grade on. I began to notice what I believe to be the effects of NCLB in Fall 2007, in students whose eighth- through twelfth-grade education had been shaped by the new dispensation. What I noticed, aside from weaknesses in reading and writing: an increased lack of engagement with the day-to-day work of a course, as if the only thing that mattered was one’s performance on a test. Think of the mindset of a student who has missed many classes, not kept up with the reading or taken notes, who still thinks it’s possible to hunker down and do reasonably well. My hunch is that a mistaken trust in “skills” — and not in deep familiarity with particular texts — helps to explain this (continuing) problem.

*

August 12, 2013: Bernstein is going back to the classroom.

Douglas Ewart and Wadada Leo Smith

Gelvin Noel Gallery
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, Illinois
February 28, 2013

Douglas Ewart, alto clarinet, sopranino saxophone, didgeridoo, flutes, percussion, electronics
Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet

Elaine and I were fortunate to hear Douglas Ewart when he was last in east-central Illinois, for a week-long residency at the University of Illinois’s Allen Hall/Unit One. Last night’s performance was part of a second Allen Hall residency devoted to teaching and improvising with students.¹

Ewart and Wadada Leo Smith met in 1967 as members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. They brought to last night’s performance — a single improvised piece, somewhere over an hour long — a long history of musical empathy. The two musicians made a striking contrast: Ewart sitting or standing before of a table full of instruments, some modest electronics in front of him, a cloth covered with little instruments and tops at his feet; Smith with one instrument and two mutes. Their communication was a matter of deep listening, as Smith rarely if ever opened his eyes while playing.

The performance offered a great variety of musical textures: muted trumpet against didgeridoo, open trumpet against alto clarinet, a long wooden flute pinging and popping like a percussion instrument, sopranino saxophone playing multiphonic parallel fourths, sopranino and trumpet chasing one another and bouncing off the walls, and at times nothing more than tiny bells (fitted to a crepuscular stamping stick) and whistling columns of air. Ewart was often the supportive figure, furnishing a rumbling foundation for Smith’s fanfares, growls, half-valve effects, multiphonics, and brilliant, round sound. Most striking to me were three somber interludes — two for sopranino and trumpet, one for flute and trumpet — that sounded like spontaneously composed music for mourners. The performance ended almost as it began, with short muted trumpet statements, this time against alto clarinet. Then, as Ewart’s sonic tops spun and fell, Smith commented on our hapless, hopeless Congress, and Ewart commented on the need for greater government support for the arts — support, he said, that would be paid back “nine-hundredfold.”

Last night’s performance was a rare blast, and at times a rare whisper. Great thanks to Jason Finkelman for continuing to bring the news to east-central Illinois.

¹ Lucky students. Our son Ben was among them last time around.

Related reading
Douglas Ewart
Wadada Leo Smith
Douglas Ewart and Stephen Goldstein (Krannert 2011, my account)
Douglas Ewart and Quasar (Krannert 2015, my account)

Mark Hurst on Google Glass

Mark Hurst: “The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience — not of the user, but of everyone other than the user.” As Hurst goes on to say, “The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.” Hurst’s post is the best thing I’ve read about Google Glass.

Overheard

On a street in a nearby city, a trio of young voices:

“What the hell?”

“What the hell? What the hell?”

“Senior adviser, my ass!”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[Hearing and preserving a scrap of anonymous conversation: very different from Google Glass.]

Recently updated

The Armory Show The Cubies’ A B C has been reprinted.