The MLA and the Taliban

Interesting piece from the Boston Globe's Ideas section on how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were treated at the latest Modern Language Association convention. A snippet:

Just a few years ago, [young assistant professor of English Aaron Santesso] noted, the Taliban was regularly attacked at MLA meetings for their treatment of women and likened to the American religious right. Now, there is only talk of how the United States has taken away the rights of the Afghan people.

Santesso said he gains a good perspective from his students, most of whom he characterized as "libertarian conservatives." Most of the debate at the MLA, he said, "would completely alienate my students."

Whole thing here.

Comments

[your supervisor]

Jennifer A.

"And I'm supposed to teach critical thinking!"

No, you're supposed to be supervising a section of a warehousing operation.

Glad I was able to clear that up for you.

[dhex]

jennifer...this is going to sound horrible - especially because i had an english teacher who sounds like you who did wonders for my literature-deprived brain - but maybe you should find a better venue for your skills and obvious drive. your super obviously fears being put into a situation he can't win (headlines screaming "racist passages taught in local HS" and the like) but i can't help but feel he should be more worried about wasting his entire life taking the edges off of every surface he comes into contact with.

i was originally talking about college kids, but i guess even that's stretching it. maybe masters' candidates?

the teacher i mentioned above taught in two of my ap english classes...and actually got into trouble over portrait of the artist because one student's parent complained about a book that mentioned sex with whores and ended so cynically!!!!

[Jennifer A.]

Dhex--

Before I taught high school I worked in a collector's publishing house researching and writing essays on topics like How to Care For Your NASCAR Memorabilia.

I remember an old college bull session: if you are in Nazi Germany working for the police, do you resign from the organization so you can keep your hands clean, or do you stay and try to subvert things from within? Not that public education is a Gestapo these days, but I think the kids actually benefit by my presence.

Besides, I like getting paid to talk about books.

[dhex]

jennifer - i admire your patience. i certainly don't possess anything near it, nor the restrait required not to whack your super upside the noggin. you are almost certainly performing a service which most of these kids would never otherwise receive. good luck.

unrelated: do they still teach the catcher in the rye? it's one of the few i remember from non-ap classes, and i only remember it because i loathed it so much.

[joe]

Jennifer, somebody's going to teach those kids. They're going to spend their formative years listening to someone talk about books, and that experience is going to play a large role in how their abilities to think and read and write develop. No matter how personally frustrated you may be, it's better for that somebody to be a person like yourself, who's at least trying.

(Please don't include typos. Please, God, just this once, no stupid typos!)

[Jennifer A.]

Dhex--

You loathed Catcher!?!? What? How? What did your teacher do to you? My God, I'm having apoplexy here.

A lot of students loathe Holden, that's easy enough, but the book is great! And led to a lot of interesting discussions--I used it to teach the basics of existentialism, Occam's Razor and other concepts.

Joe--unless you are a student of mine, you are safe from criticism unless I decide you NEED the lesson. Example: at a party a friend teased me about smoking through a jeweled cigarette holder. "A cigarette holder! Could you be any pompouser?"

"Well," I said in a super-refined voice, "I could point out that the proper phrase is 'be more pompous.'"

[jon b.]

Well, if we can all get past the fact that we?re smitten with Jennifer?

Dan Rather was all over Houston?s dropout rates last night. They reported drop out rates between 25 and 50 percent in urban high schools. How does that compare with your experience?

[Jennifer A.]

My school system wasn't that bad, but it was a small suburban town. But I have a long list of complaints, which would take too long to list here. Right now I am seeking a job in another state with higher salaries.

[Warren]

Jennifer,
I too loath catcher. I read it in Mrs. Petchowers 20th Century American Literature, along with The Great Gatsby, The Jungle, Of mice and Men, and others. At the time I decided that Mrs. P evaluated the quality of a piece by how close you came to slitting your wrists after you read it. Furthermore we were told that all the trite literary devices like metaphor and foreshadowing is what made a great writer. In particular, I remember being told that placing the scene where the protagonist has his big change of heart and starts to take charge of his life in the Egyptian crypt room of the museum, "is symbolic of the characters resurrection and rebirth" and that it was pure genius on the authors part. I just about puked right there.

I have no use for that ivory tower style of writing.

[Jennifer A.]

Warren--

I agree teachers like that need to be removed. But Holden is a teenager with a monstrously bad attitude; on one level teens can relate to him, while at the same time they realize that he takes it too far. And so on--I can't really put my whole Catcher lesson here.

The thing is, if I am teaching you a book I do not take the attitude, "This book is great, and you must work hard to appreciate it." Instead, I feel, "This book is great, and I will explain and show you why."

This was influenced by a teacher of my own, who sneered that the reason we hated Moby Dick was because we weren't educated enough to appreciate it. Well, I now have one more college degree than she did, and I still hate it. Her comment did not shame me into loving Melville; if anything, it cemented my resolve agaiinst him.

I gave my students two criticisms of Catcher; one saying Holden was great and one saying he was an idiot. Then the students had to compare and contrast the criticisms, and explain which one they agreed with and why.

I also taught them my personal rule:
"There are two basic types of literary criticism: one where the critic has discovered a cool new thing about a book and wants to share it with others, and one where the critic wants to show off how many big words he knows." Needless to say, I oppose the latter.

[Jennifer A.]

Forgot to say, when I discussed the Egyptian museum scene with my students I used it as an example of Holden's self-contradiction: early in the book he wrote a pathetically ignorant paper about Egyptian culture, and now he's trying to teach it to the next generation?

[joe]

Warren, I assure, any "ivory tower" feelings you took away from "Catcher" should be attributed to Mrs. Petchowers, not the book itself. Give it another shot.

[thoreau]

I thought Catcher was an OK book. I wasn't assigned to read it, but I decided to read it one day because I heard that people have tried to ban it.

If nobody had ever tried to ban it, I probably wouldn't have read it without being assigned to. Sort of like flag burning: I won't do it until they ban it, and then I'll do it gleefully.

[dhex]

at the time i was reading a lot more interesting things (joyce, burroughs, etc) and having to read a book in which the main character is unsympathetic and boring just set my teeth on edge. his being a spoiled brat didn't help either. i've considered picking it up again, but just don't have the drive.

sorry. 🙂

[John Avelis Jr.]

The MLA is dedicated to language in the service of post-post modern, Neo-Stalinist politics. To call them "English Professors" is rather like calling Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald McLean and Anthony Burgess "Cambridge scholars" and letting it go at that....

[Citizen]

Screw 'em all. I'm only using Chicago style documentation from now on.

[dhex]

heh, neo-stalinist...

do you really think these guys could purge a fly?

sometimes the rhetoric here get a little MLA'd up for my tastes...

[Jennifer A.]

I've never been to an MLA convention, but the political crap I had to put up with while getting my graduate degree in English changed me from a philanthropic Democrat to the Libertarian misanthrope I am today. I took one class called "The Teaching of Writing," where I thought I would learn how to teach kids to write well. Instead, I learned that teachers should not allow students to use 'he' as a generic pronoun, and I learned that you can have moral standards OR a penis, but not both.

I learned another lesson, which I make a point of teaching to all my college-bound seniors: When you get to college, there is nothing wrong with a female professor with long, straight hair parted in the middle, and there is nothing wrong with a female professor who teaches classes with the word 'feminist' in the title. But if you see a female professor with long, straight hair parted in the middle who teaches a class with the word 'feminist' in the title, RUN AWAY!

[dhex]

what i don't understand is instead of teaching all these classes about the morals of language (my fiance has a masters in english and is pursuing a phd in high modernism, sort of riding the backlash as it were back to more pure theory without all the politics) why don't people teach more about using language as a personal weapon?

if the assumption is that certain cultural norms and rules and related bullshit are coded into language (something no one will disagree with so long as you pick the correct political stance to illustrate with) why not teach a sort of academica version of NLP, rambo-style?

maybe there's more merit in smacking people over the head then?

[Jennifer A.]

Dhex--

Based upon my experience, you can't teach kids how to use language as a weapon; you can barely use it to teach them how to communicate.

I had to have my Honors kids write a 'Persuasive essay,' where the presumed reader is someone whose opinions are different from yours. One kid wrote an anti-abortion essay, explaining how abortion is evil and abortionists are murderers, etc. I pointed out that he is supposed to be PERSUADING people, and who has ever decided to change their behavior by being called evil? (Bin Laden: "You mean terrorism is EVIL? I never knew that! I will change my ways at once!")

And I got in trouble, for not being sensitive to other people's values.

On a related subject, today Fark.com has a story about how companies admit they're moving to India because American workers don't have the skills they should have learned in school. At my high school, the unofficial rule was: plan your grading scale so that even the stupidest kids can get a D average so long as they do their assignments.

Another true story: I taught Huck Finn to Honors kids. The main lesson, of course, is that the book is NOT racist, even though the language in it is. So I planned a lesson where I gave the kids an excerpt from Gone With the Wind, which IS a racist book. The kids were to determine how the same language can be racist in GWTW, but anti-racist in HF.

My supervisor nixed the assignment, and asked why I would even think of giving it. I said, "Because right now the kids are just parroting me, when I say Huck Finn is not racist. I want them to see for themselves why this is so."

"They don't need to do that," my supervisor said. "They can just take your word for it."

And I'm supposed to teach critical thinking!

[dhex]

huh?

i'm sure you're referencing a movie or something but i just can't place it.

[Mona]

For some gigles, and if you want to generate a competely meaningless, postmodern essay, go here: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern

Some software geeks have devised a program that takes all the woo woo, pomo notions, and their favored trendy terms like hermeneutics, paradigms, transgressing etc... and allows generators (us) to puke forth tens of thousands of pieces of bilge that are barely distinguishable from many a lit crit genuine effort.

[AJMB]

Catcher in the Rye? Loved it so much I can't seem to stop buying copies of it. I'm up to 147 now. You don't think anything is strange about that, do you?