sadly not surprising

Deb and I had a conversation with a friend of ours last night. She used to practice law but now teaches first grade. It was something to hear how she struggled this year to comply with teaching-reading curriculum constraints (complete emphasis on rote learning) while also trying to get kids to want to read, to love to read.

After I described some of my ideas for my thesis (on religion in the writing classroom), she also talked about her experience going from 12 years of Catholic school to Reed College in Portland where students wore t-shirts that said, “Communism, Atheism, and Free Love.” No surprise, but religious ideas were considered at best worthless and at worst juvenile. Again, not surprising. She also recalled asking religious leaders some deep questions and being given either simplistic or authoritarian answers and/or being told that her questions were a sign of weak faith. Also, sadly, not surprising.

Anyway, the conversation reminded me of how often that fear of doubt and questioning happens, as well as how fortunate I was to have almost never experienced it — one, because I didn’t grow up attending religious services or being part of a religious congregation at all, and two because it was actually reading and questioning which lead me to my faith in my early 20s (and then, as an adult, I continued to study — in the 1990s, getting a M.Div.) I almost connect “faith” with thinking, reading, and writing.

So… I was just thinking that I probably need to remind myself that my experience may be, very sadly enough, not common.

“When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” That bumper sticker was on their car. :-)

“21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit”

There’s an article from AP religion writer Eric Gorski in the Yakima-Herald today: “Religious Americans: My faith isn’t the only way.” Not that much surprising. But I did smile when I read

Another finding almost defies explanation: 21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent “absolutely certain.”

I have long thought that a lot of the self-identified atheists I’ve known have actually not been non-theists. They are in fact non-Christians or non-religionists. There are not philosophically against the possibility of a god or of a theistic viewpoint; they simply (often strongly) disbelieve western religious formulations of God, mainly the ones based on the (more traditional) biblical and koranic characterizations.

And I don’t blame them. I almost applaud it, this resistance to traditional western conceptions of God — in moderation. I was actually one of these kinds of atheists for about a year when I was in my second year of college. Philosophical arguments seemed to me to have disproved the possibility that the god of the old testament (it was mainly the old testament that gave me problems) could be a divine being — or, at least, could not be the divine being of the theistic philosophers or theologians. There was just too much contradiction between theists’ propositions and the old testament’s descriptions. Just didn’t work. They sounded like children’s myths.

And, looking back, the philosophy book I read was arguing for atheism not by showing that theism was untenable but that biblical characterizations of God were incompatible with theistic logic. But that argument required those philosophers to first do biblical interpretation, and to then postulate that their interpretation (basically a literal one) accurately and always represented western theism. Anyway, again, they were not arguing against theism as a philosophical construct, but against traditional biblical characterizations of God. At the time, I took their interpretations of the biblical characterizations as the same in essence as theistic arguments. Bible = theism, in other words. Or, one interpretation of Bible = theism. And probably a lot of people still do that.

Anyway! It all comes back to definitions, doesn’t it. “Atheist” doesn’t mean “non-theist” to a lot of people. It’s used as a way of saying, “I don’t believe that religion stuff, but I might believe in God.” That’s the way I used it back in 1981. Actually, when I ever do meet an atheist (in the strict definition of the term), I’m pretty interested to hear her view of things, because I know she’s had to come to a completely non-theistic worldview, not just a non-religious, or non-western-religious one. And that’s always a pretty sophisticated philosophical process.

journal entries for WR593 The Rhetorical Tradition

I just posted most of my journal entries (and one of the presentations) from WR 593 The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Writing (from winter term). Half-a-year delay, but I finally get it done! ;-)

They’re found under the WR 593 Rhetorical Tradition category and/or January and February 2008

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok

I just read the article “The First Lady’s Lady Friend” by Kenneth Lynn (from The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America, 1983), about Eleanor Roosevelt’s love affair with Lorena Hickok — well, mostly about the way in which Hickok and F.D. Roosevelt biographers minimize it (or, in Doris Faber’s case, over-focus on the question of its exact physical/sexual nature).

I’ve read the published collection of their correspondence (Empty Without You, 1998 ) and a couple of ER biographies. But even I hadn’t put two and two together to notice that it might not have been coincidence that ER’s transformation (from an often diffident and depressed wife of a New York governor turned U.S. President into a great political force) coincided with the consistent and passionate love she received from Lorena Hickok. I think Lynn could be right on.

Only fleetingly does [Faber] give evidence of realizing that the great interest of the Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence consists in its revelation of how Eleanor Roosevelt broke free of a lifetime of self-doubt. [...] The more pages Mrs. Roosevelt fills with protestations of how much her secret private life has come to mean to her, the more pages she devotes to telling Miss Hickok about her rapidly expanding public life. The Hickok-Roosevelt correspondence not only chronicles a love affair, it traces the emergence of the most active First Lady in American history.

Both Roosevelt and Hickok became especially concerned with the poor. Lynn continues:

That both Mrs Roosevelt and Miss Hickok were extraordinarily concerned with the suffering of poor Americans in the 1930s can be partially explained by the fact that Miss Hickok was forced to give up her newspaper career in order to continue her romance with Mrs Roosevelt, that she thereupon went to work for Harry Hopkins’s Federal Emergencey Relief Administration — which gave her detailed knowledge of the poor — and that she passed on everything she learned to Mrs. Roosevelt. Their exchanges on this subject, however, did not take place in a vacuum. They took place in the context of a love affair which the participants had to keep secret lest they be disgraced and which had been built upon mutual confessions of victimization and despair [mainly, during their childhoods]

Photo: ER and LH in Puerto Rico in 1934.

“The Fate of the Sentence”

I knew I liked Martha Kolln. She was quoted in a Washington Post article about those who are worried that a deterioration of the sentence (due to text messaging, etc) will lead soon to a general lessening of critical thinking ability (and presumably the fall of western civilization!). Anyway, she says something like, “I’m more optimistic” and “I’d need more evidence.” I cheered her, because that’s exactly what i was thinking.

Oh, and then the article ends this way:

Wilson Follett, writing in Atlantic magazine, offered proof [of the deterioration of the sentence]. In an essay titled “Death of the Sentence,” fiction writer and literary critic Follett wrote, “To deal with the organization of thought in words is of necessity to deal with the sentence.”

In all languages, he added, “it has been the great continuum.”

The sentence, he declared, “is a structure inherently faithful to the pattern of consciousness.” It is “an instrument inevitable and perfect for the expression of thought.”

But, wrote Follett, the sentence is under attack. “To what stage of vagueness, confusion, or sheer lunacy must the English sentence be pushed to evoke any noticeable volume of outcry?”

Follett’s essay appeared in Atlantic’s October issue. Of 1937.

At the time, he was not concerned about millions of text-messagers and e-mailers killing the sentence. He was worried about highbrow writers — such as John Dos Passos and Harvard University’s Bernard DeVoto — using long, looping sentences that did not adhere to the strict grammatical and punctuation rules of the day.

Back then there was concern that sentences were too complex; today, that sentences are not complex enough. And that’s the way it.

I love it.

fun with Wordle… rhetoric… God… body…

Ooh, way fun. Thanks, Marjorie. And Michael, you’re right: word clouds just got way cooler. This first one is my final Rhetorical Traditions paper, from winter term. (Click on image to see a bigger version.)

This one is an evening prayer service I led at our church back in December.

And this is a short response paper I wrote after reading excerpts of Cixous’s “Coming to Writing” (for Literacy Studies, Spring term).

Rhetoric… God… body… Hmm, is rhetoric God’s body?? :-)

when will the arts join the sciences in space?

I’ve been caught up in space lately. The combination of the Mars Phoenix lander (arrived a couple weeks ago) and the shuttle (orbiting with the space station the last week or so) plus the NASA channel, and I’m a bit distracted. I watch the space walks, try to imagine the world-view and the weightlessness. I stare at photos of the northern Martian plains.

I’ve always been fascinated with this stuff — well, as much as someone with humanities degrees can understand it (though I did do well in Astronomy and Cosmology as an undergrad).

When the first shuttle went up in 1981, when I was 19, I remember thinking that surely in my lifetime they would get to the point where they would sell passenger rides into space. I even thought the price would be do-able — I don’t know, something like $5000 or $10000 (!). (Now it cost about $4200 to take a ride on a “vomit comet” to experience zero-gravity for 30 seconds at a time.) Even then I knew that NASA, or any other space agency, would not send up anyone but scientists, pilots, and engineers at their own expense. They did decide to send up a K-12 educator in 1986, of course. But even then it was because K-12 educators teach and influence future scientists and engineers.

So 27 years later, it’s clear that it will also be way past my lifetime before NASA sends up, say, a great photographer or great writer or poet, let alone before there’ll be any commercial orbital passenger flights. Don’t get me wrong — the astronauts take some excellent photos and some even write later pretty eloquently about their experiences. And it’s just the usual order of things when exploring a new frontier. No artists or writers went along with Lewis and Clark. The explorers had to draw the pictures and record the thoughts. So it’s just going to be a long, long time before space contains the arts as well as the sciences.

Oh well…

On the other hand, sometimes the more I reflect on the conditions beyond earth (utterly inhospitable to human beings, without sophisticated technology), the more this planet seems like “heaven,” like “paradise,” and the more I’m content to stay right here.

But, still… it’d be nice to read the writings of a deeply reflective and articulate soul who had rode some orbits along with the scientists and engineers.

Erratum, June 23, 2008: Was watching “When We Left Earth” last night and found out that Christa McAuliffe was a social studies teacher. Mea culpa. Makes the challenger explosion that much more heart-breaking (if that’s possible). It’s cool, though, that Barbara Morgan, Christa’s back-up in 1986, became a full-fledged astronaut and flew last year to the space station.

bumper sticker

I’ve seen this bumper sticker a couple times in my apartment building’s parking lot: “Sometimes ignorance comes disguised as tradition.”

Very true. Or, better — injustice comes disguised as tradition.

But, then again, both ignorance and injustice also come disguised as progress, too.

Ignorance and injustice just like to hide behind other movements, other categories of thought. People just like to use whatever ideology they like however they like — too often for their basest emotions.

But, oooh, I’m not aaaalways this cynical!

start off with the answer?

I was just skimming this post of mine from last year about the pedagogical and cognitive limitations of PowerPoint presentations. The research suggested that

the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digest in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

I concluded with this note:

Professor Sweller also says that it’s better to teach by presenting an already-solved problem rather than asking students to work out the problems themselves. That seems counter-intuitive. But he says that “Looking at an already solved problem reduces the working memory load and allows you to learn. It means the next time you come across a problem like that, you have a better chance at solving it.

Now that makes me wonder if that’s the same reason we in the west prefer essays which state their theses right at the beginning and paragraphs which start off with topic sentences. We like easier reading. If we valued complexity and/or put more emphasis on the needs of the writer as opposed to the needs of the reader, we would probably have evolved a rhetoric, like some non-western rhetorics, which makes the reader’s brain work harder, which circles around the thesis, only getting to it much later (or not explicitly at all).

Does Professor Sweller’s observation also mean that deductive explanations will work better in classrooms than inductive ones?

yikes, should I change my blog name?

I just came across the word “cultivated” in an article I’m reading, and it just now occurred to me that there’s a definition of “cultivated” — as “educated” or “refined” — that I definitely didn’t mean when I entitled my blog “Cultivated Pages.”

I don’t know why this other definition didn’t occur to me until today (!) — probably because to me the word has always first conveyed a rich organic and human metaphor such as that of a gardener cultivating a garden. I always liked the way Thoreau used it: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect for right” (from “Civil Disobedience,” I’m pretty sure), and “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage” (from Walden?).

So I didn’t mean “Cultivated Pages” as in educated or refined pages. Yikes, makes me want to re-name my blog and move to a new URL. “Educated” and “refined” sound simply too uppity. I didn’t mean that at all.

What do any readers think? When you read the title Cultivated Pages, do you first think of “refined and educated pages”??