Finally, an Update

As usual, when it's been a long time since I've updated a blog, I'll put up some excuses which really serve to make me feel better and whittle away at the guilt of having left this thing hanging.

Work is, as usual, work. It amazes me that my students have to learn grammar lessons that I have managed to go through life without. This and I've snagged myself an English degree, am very close to a master's, and I think in general write well enough to be grammatically correct at least. I spent a night laboring over how to teach the restrictive and non-restrictive clause. It was said to me that an understanding of the restrictive and non-restrictive clause is essential to our appreciation of literature. While that may get some people off, I found myself struggling first to understand it, and then how I would convince others that this knowledge was of utmost importance. 'Course it's much easier to say, it'll be in the exam, so study it.

It's interesting that in subjects like math or science there are things that you just have to know. It's that simple. This knowledge is essential, so learn it. Even if you won't become a chemist, each of us has at one time or another had to memorize or at least manage to navigate their way around the periodic table of elements. Or remember all those postulates and theorems we had to learn for geometry? Well how about English? Sadly the approach to English is veering further towards the functional. End product: people who can work at call centers. Our pop culture isn't helping with this at all. We enjoy laughing at people who muck up and go barok. anyways, there is a movement away from teaching literature as literature, truly and purely, at least from where I stand. I know, I know, there are educational theories to support this and blah blah blah, but how great it would be to select the best poems, stories, and novels and just discuss them. It would presuppose the teacher's good grasp of literature and maybe more difficult the students' ability to read and respond to literature. At least where I teach, the responsibility to motivate is on the teacher, and more often than not my students don't bother to read the texts that are required of them.

It makes me terribly sad when I come to class prepared to discuss a text, let's say I'm really excited to talk about Lord of the Flies because it's just great material and there's so much there to mine, and the class looks to be dozing off and it's obvious that most of them didn't read. You give a quiz that's over 20, and you're lucky if even a few students get ten items right. and then there's the great reasoning, this doesn't have anything to do with my life anyway.

they don't see the relevance because we have failed to remind them that these are the humanities. these are the things that make us human, our appreciation of beauty and the ability to feel and sympathize and understand and question. Whose fault is it? I suppose we English teachers are partly to blame for making the study of English a functional one, where language learning is the goal and not the greater appreciation of literature. Literature is seen as a tool through which language can be taught, it is not taken as literature itself. Just see how long we have had to labor over literature selections, how difficult it is to get them approved. And in the end, the language is also seen as just a tool.

This brings to mind a lot of the recent discussions in my literary theory class. One of the great ideas was Kant's purposeless purpose, which is what things of beauty should have. their purpose it to be beautiful.

What I've been thinking more of and wanting to blog about, but been trying to digest first, are some of Schiller's ideas. He says that because of society, we have become halved, between two drives. There is the sensuous drive, which binds us to our understanding of the physical world and which is rooted in change. There is constant change that we can observe. then there is the formal drive, which pushes us to understand things as their forms, which has us moving towards things that are constant. Basically, we can see these two drives as the gap between the natural physical sciences and the humanities. And Schiller goes on to say that our society pushes us to devote ourselves to one or the other, but a devotion to one will make us incomplete and near idiots. A full understanding of the sensuous drive but negligence to the formal drive makes us robots, vice versa and we blabber about a world we fail to understand. However Schiller believes there is a third drive which marries these two drives, that these two drives do not necessarily have to be in opposition of each other.

For me, what's exciting is that lately I've been reading a lot of science books, and we see these scientists constantly turning to ideas in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences or other liberal arts and humanities, to provide frameworks which they can work with. I believe, with this kind of thinking, and how we see the proliferation of interdisciplinary studies and the mixing of these two drives consistently. I believe that we, at this point in time, may be moving towards reaching that third drive. all over the place we see the synergies and connections, and all it takes is our development of brain synapses that would allow us to process so many things.

the great irony is that now, in the age of information, when everything is a click away, lots of people are even lazier in their search for knowledge. Hello, my students, this may be a wake up call.