notes on Tuesday night

[alexr_rwx]

- Paul Graham is one hoopy frood. Not only does he write books about Lisp and essays about programming, he's put out a lovely essay on the topic of essay-ing, surprise and being observant, and the development of weird situations in society like comb-overs and highschool and English departments. Here's an excerpt:

For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

Yes, this was on /., but a lot of you don't read /., and a lot of you who do wouldn't follow a link from it to read an essay about essays by a guy who normally writes about Lisp. But I've read the article, and it's excellent... and I recommend that you read it too. So there!

- Earlier on tonight, Mike and I got our compilers project working, with nearly six hours to spare. *jubilation*

- Everybody likes the new gym at Tech. Everybody. It's lovely, and I'm pleasantly sore :)

- Congrambolations to Tim neuroticmonk on his 100 days of uptime! We're from the band Limozeen!

Comments

[agonistes]

I think you know what I'm going to say.

[rheavatarin.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I think that by his definition of an essay, you would not consider that particular paper to be one. It is, however, extremely well written, persuasive, and interesting. Frankly, I agree with it muchly. Writing is too important a subject to be wasted on critical analyses of literature. Perhaps in high school, instead of four years of english they should split it into two years of rhetoric and two years of literature. Yes, I think that would be best. Hell, it doesn't even have to be creative rhetoric. Instead, given an array of topics or one tremendously vague topic write something interesting. It would force the students to both learn enough about a topic to find something interesting to them to write about, and (equally importantly) learn how to write interestingly about something that will make the topic interesting to someone else. I must mention this to Christin and bounce ideas off of her, perhaps to the gainful benefit of some future high school that she teaches at.

Thank you for alerting me to this most excellent idea. =)

[agonistes]

Whoa there, Tex.

Writing is too important a subject to be wasted on critical analyses of literature.

So any work of writing that analyzes literature in a critical fashion is a waste? Because that's how I'm reading what you wrote. Please tell me if I'm reading your words incorrectly...and then discount most of the below.

The well-written essay on English literature, whether critical, argumentative, or some mix of the two, teaches you valuable argumentative skills. I think the problem you see with critical analyses of literature as American essays go -- the Brits do it differently, although I'm not sure quite how; you could ask soupytwist if you're curious -- is that in most American schools, writing as an improvable skill is ignored. There are magnet secondary schools, like the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and summer programs, like Georgia's Governor's Honors Program, that cater to high school kids with an interest in writing -- but the kids these schools and programs service already have an established interest in writing. The problem starts earlier than that. The skills of advanced essay-writing come with age and practice, sure, but who honestly gets exposed to them? Who gets to practice them before taking on that scary junior-year research paper?

I don't know if you took AP US History, or any AP history course at all, but the Document Based Question (or DBQ) relies heavily on the kind of writing that you seem to vilify. It's not only literature that requires these skills.

Instead, given an array of topics or one tremendously vague topic write something interesting. It would force the students to both learn enough about a topic to find something interesting to them to write about, and (equally importantly) learn how to write interestingly about something that will make the topic interesting to someone else.

Given world enough and time, this scenario will work. The majority of American public secondary schools do not have this luxury. Students have to be invested in wanting to make their writing better in order to make their writing better. For that, you need good teachers of writing -- and administrations who are open to such a thing. Honestly? With all the subjects covered in high school, giving writing the attention it needs -- assuming the student hasn't by some miracle managed to learn how to write well before entering high school -- is for the most part a flagrant impossibility unless writing is integrated to a huge extent across the curriculum.

Most standardized tests used in the United States -- the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the California Achievement Test are the ones I have personally taken on several occasions, and I know they're used in many states -- do not require writing portions. Until they do, I doubt writing will be a focus in most American schools beyond rudimentary grammar and syntax. There are grass roots efforts in several communities -- 826 Valencia is a notable and wonderful one -- to improve writing...but until more students are required to write well to get a high school diploma, things aren't going to change.

So in short: while some of the analyses that you and Graham present are accurate, there's a lot more depth to the issue. Some of the problems can be laid at the doorstep of the teachers, but it goes beyond the teachers to the American system of education.

The end. :D

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

>> Writing is too important a subject to be wasted on critical analyses of literature.
> So any work of writing that analyzes literature in a critical fashion is a waste?

At risk of sounding like a coalition of geeks are mounting an attack on your way of life (which I realize is how things generally end up sounding)...

I'm not entirely sure what the Roos means by that, however, I do have a sense of his appreciation for argumentation; he was a master debator (and practitioner of forensics, iirc) in highschool... so one possible interpretation of that sentence is that it's a waste to link expressive writing and literature so closely, which is what Señor Graham was getting at.

Writing is about expressing thought, and thought is often about things that don't happen to be literature; I rather like his suggestion, with the English class redistributed into two classes. There are people out there who don't care very much about literature, and while they're clearly misguided, everybody deserves to get practice with clear expression.

Also, it's not clear to me what he's vilifying, particularly -- really, the "make an interesting essay about one of these things" could be viewed as a less-focused and broader-timescale version of a DBQ.

But I think that the most interesting bit of the essay (or non-essay), is the emphasis on the conflict between truth and persuasion... that's a terribly beautiful idea Graham brings up, how as your audience approaches Perfectly Smart, your argument has got to approach Perfectly True (or at least Perfectly Valid) in order to be persuasive...

So either Something Needs To Be Done about curricula... or it's okay, because the stars are burning out anyway. And also, schools are merely an economic adaptation our society's picked up that keep children out of the workforce longer and longer so the adults can have jobs, as population increases and mechanization makes it so that ever-fewer people are actually picking up heavy things and moving them, and the education that they provide is in fact... totally orthogonal to what most people will do in their professional lives.

Holy crap: average white-collar worker. Uses calculus (or even algebra?) on a daily basis, or ever? Needs to remember about the Holy Roman Empire? Writes scholarly essays about James Joyce? Speaks (or remembers, even), French? Plays dodgeball? ...

[agonistes]

...I just spent half an hour composing a nice response to this, and then LJ ATE IT.

Will get back to you on this when am not swamped with work and things to do.

[rheavatarin.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I do not believe that all critical analysis of literature (or whatever topic you feel is appropriate) is entirely a waste. I think that my key arguement is that the only kind of writing that is taught in the average secondary school is of such a type. As Alex pointed out, I competed in extemporanious speech and original oratory forensics events in high school and strongly believe that persuasion is a very important skill. My point is that writing as a particular means of communication is not taught in schools, while the argumentative format taken in critical analysis is. A better approach, IMO would be to teach writing as a means of communication and then adapt that tool to whatever particular job you need it for. Similar with speech, it can be used in a persuasive mode or in a storytelling mode or a conversational mode, et al. I believe it would be better to give students the tools with which to properly communicate and then (in a cross-disciplinary manner) show how these tools can be used.