You're right, Craig

I should have said something.

I’ll just write what I was thinking during those fifty minutes, and maybe that will make up for some of it.

This is where we as intellectuals separate, splinter and co/llapse into our di/tri/vided subject/ivisms.


I like ol’ Vic. You’re right, class, he’s not a man of clarity, but is that such a bad thing? Does/is everything (need) to be so c/leaved and sapless as to render all readers prostrate with comprehension? Dare I say no? Dare I say that no one understands what I understand?
I wrote in another post, "When I say Horse, what do you think of?"
I think of my youngest brother. He had laryngitis when he was twelve. We spent two weeks making up sign language in order to communicate, but mainly to cast aspersions against my older brother when he was in the room.

Of course, the words Horse and hoarse aren’t spelled the same, but that just adds something to my definition.

This individual response is what Vitanza is digging for/cultivating/planting.
There is a state of individualism that goes into personal thought. A state which is influenced by past experiences and vague/fugue opines that I, as I am not you, will never under/stand. And I suppose that is quite alright, because it drives me to try to understand. It begs me to take my feelings and combine it with a dozen other thoughts which are floating, aimless, above my head.
I think that fuzzy gray condition is the shape/spatial arrangement of something as different from its substance/trapezoid from which Vitanza is stuck and wandering/wondering.
In class, we spoke of Sophistic argument as being manipulative and lacking a point. Maybe. Does it manipulate or simply present. Sometimes pre/suming a unequi/vocal answer to any question can be a shameless display of ignorance. To expect someone to follow a recipe and an outcome of thought is not proliferating critical cerebration. I think that it presents options. It urges the reader to come to a conclusion, or at least formulate an idea.
Or at the very least think about it some more.

I honestly believe that Vitanza uses the con/muddled language because he wants to present something else. He wants to present the in/fin/ite/beginning options. Vitanza uses word-play and metaphor to illustrate that every word is subjective and suggestive.

ThEYEorize.

What do you think of that word? What does that word entail and presuppose for you-- the reader/thinker?
Its definition changes with each person, because how could one person presume to hold the definite definition for any given word, for any given emotion?
He uses political revolutions/historical events to incur emotions, to foster knowledge, to find that lagging attention.
Words foster emotions, and the desire to understand. So, if a confusing sentencial relation makes the reader need to read and re-read then maybe that is all he wanted in the first place.
I’m not saying that I know what he was saying in his essay, only that he was probably saying quite a few things.
Well, anyway, that’s how I feel about it.

Le brouillard de l'etude

The writing process.
We've spent this entire semester learning how to teach writing. As a graduate student, I have spent the last three semesters learning the "Writing Process," or was it product?
We're learning to inoculate, to break down, to build up, to ride around, to run around post/modernizing the writing process and the students that we teach. ( I'm using the royal "We" here, since I am not teaching this year, and so can only look at these processes through the dim and unfocused eyes of the outsider.)
But I can see quite clearly with the eyes of the student learning to write.
This week someone touched upon the idea of high school versus college writing. Or maybe the actual subject was "My English Teacher Taught Me During Half-Time." I felt rather lucky during that conversation. My high school English teacher was wonderful. Most of the students hated her because she wouldn't let anyone chew gum during class, and her druthers involved assigning twenty page papers. I dug on her. I was fully prepared for my first semester in college, and I think it was because we wrote constantly in her classes. We generally kept within a very formulaic outline of reader response and criticism, but it certainly didn't hurt me to write more.
So, I'm just wondering about that first semester at the university.
Does it really make or break a writing student? Or is that giving too much credit to 100 and 110 classes?
How does one start to teach writing? How does a teacher get through the fog of learning that is hovering around some of those first year college writers?
How do graduate assistants get rid of the idea that the writing really isn't as bad as all of that?
When I was in high school my math teacher was the woman whom I named as my arch nemesis. Our relationship and interactions were uncomfortable at best.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I still hate math. Walking into a math class makes me want to drop out of school just so that I don't have to deal with any math teacher/pro/fessor ever again.
I know that every teacher is not Mrs. Clark, but I always see her 50's hair and huge glasses when I encounter arithmetical theorem.

So how do teachers deal with the presuppositions of the student?
Any teacher can reference those icons until his/her breath is absolutely gone, but when all of those greats have death-rattled their way into the sunset, it really is up to the Teacher to tear away those prejudices.

Because, you know, I really loathed Mrs. Clark.

IntraPersonal Communication: Office Politics in the CLASSroom

I believe that every semester on whatever day that Friday the 13th falls upon, I start to re-evaluate my role as an aca/pandemic in the classroom. I start to scrutinize my place in the student/teacher/student trifecta and bemusedly question pretty much everything that goes along with it, but mainly I analyze. I like to look at the student/ teacher relationship, because, it is, for most of us, is a sub/stantial part of our lives

Should I have tried harder these past few months?
Does it matter if my teacher actually likes me?
Does it matter if I actually like my teacher?
Am I an ignorant person ?
Am I doing well in the class based on any of these questions or their not-so-forthcoming answers?

I remember school as something..dare I say...cool, until I started attending. My older brothers climbed on and off bus number 7 five days a week. My mom bought them new shoes, and pencils, and crayons, and plastic boxes in which to place those crayons.
Then I went to school and learned that the bus was possibly the worst thing to ever enter my life. Large. Yellow. Rank. Unnerving.
The bus took me to a place that was just as large, yellow, rank and unnerving.
If I were to go out on a limb and actually write that this has been the standard for the whole of my education, would that limb hold me?
This has been every classroom, every assignment, almost every teacher, every hallway for the duration of my academic career. Granted, there are those students who have experiences that are quite nice---those wonderful academic careers full of dandelion wine-- those classes in the shade.
But not always.
So, if I know the abject horror I feel toward most classes, how can my personal teaching pedagogy hold my students to higher standards?
Should I assume that every student is academically prepared for every class and for every assignment?
Should I raise an eyebrow at every seemingly ludicrous question?
Or should I just answer the question and let it go?