Voluminous

“Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory…The library, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time…what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.” 

- Leon Wieseltier, “Voluminous,” The New Republic: http://bit.ly/Anv1yD

Taking Care in Teaching

“One [misconception], said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is what she called a ‘myth’ about different learning styles, in which it is thought that some students learn best visually, others by hearing, and still others kinesthetically.’There’s no evidence, zero, that teaching methods should be matched up with different learning styles,” Ms. Banaji said. “It’s intuitively appealing, but not scientifically supported.’”

I picked out this quote from the Chronicle article, “Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching,” because it’s always bothered me how pervasive this myth is today. We often hear things like, “Oh, I’m a visual learner. I can’t understand lectures on quantum mechanics.” Turns out it’s tough to prove.

And it makes sense too. I mean, as kids, we live or die by our ability to listen to our parents. Mothers don’t typically spend a lot of time trying to teach their kids kinesthetically, or draw a visual diagram when crossing the street. They just say, “Grab my hand!” or “Look both ways!”

Of course this example includes seeing, hearing and doing, and some kids may get more out of each, but we all have the ability to listen when it really matters to us. This is why I think the more they test the connection between teaching to these individual styles and actual learning results, the more they find it doesn’t amount to much.

I’d suggest that a more basic way to consider teaching and learning outcomes is to explore practical ways to promote “care.” The point I take from the example above is that we tend to learn the things that we care about from people who demonstrate that they care about us. A simple pedagogical principle is summed up in polite ways we say good-bye, “take care.”

The philosophical tradition that I tend to spend the most time in finds its roots in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had a lot to say about what it means to exist, or to be-there [Dasein]. He was particularly interested in how our being is directed towards particular things in the world. How do things matter to us? Not just why things matter, but how do they come to be important for us? Heidegger thought that this was a key question to understanding the world we live in. A key category he developed in this regard was Sorge, the German word for care.  A prominent example Heidegger gives is a carpenter’s hammer. If we want to know what it is, we might think to investigate its material properties, it’s composition as metal or wood. But Heidegger argues that this doesn’t tell us what it is for us. To understand how it matters for us, you need to ask how it fits into the carpenter’s set of concerns, as a device used to build things, as an artistic tool, as a way of bringing order in his or her world. 

Much more could be said here, but the point is that understanding why you care about something is crucial to what you study. Understanding how you end up caring about something is crucial to thinking about good teaching and learning. 

A modest suggestion from my own limited experience about what’s gone wrong with university education follows from this. The problem is not that lectures are not visual or kinesthetic enough. Rather, this is just a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that the basic context which fosters our learning as human beings has been broken. That is:

1. We’re often lectured about subjects that seem irrelevant to our lives
2. By lecturers who seem distant and rather disinterested.

Interestingly, these two points relate directly to most people I talk to about their best learning experiences.

Firstly, people often comment that the subject areas that they eventually end up majoring in at university are the things that were either compellingly interesting to them or that they could see were crucial to their future success, i.e. they cared a lot about them. This also explains why some people who were told early in life that they weren’t university material, end up being some of the most knowledgeable experts because they just got to working and learned what they needed to know on the way. They found that they could easily read about what they cared about.  

Secondly, when most people think back on their intellectual development, there are often great teachers that figure highly. With all the talk on improving education these days, the surveys keep showing the same result: teachers matter. This is not to say that there is any one method or magic bullet for good teaching. Rather, there are habits or virtues such as willingness, persistence and believing in students that matter most to learning. People often cite the teacher who took the time to encourage them or just had a way of explaining the subject that most interested them. Sometimes its a teacher early on in middle school or even kindergarten who believed in them when no one else did.

In any case, I have to admit, I do spend time making my lectures as visual and interactive as I can because I still think seeing, hearing and dialoguing on a subject helps embodied human beings with eyes and ears learn. But, more and more, I’m coming to think that my main focus is to keep working to convey in my courses that:

1. What students are being asked to learn is relevant and very important to their future success (yes, the study of philosophy is still really important in the world today); and,  
2. As their lecturer, I do actually care about their learning and future, and will keep trying week after week to help them learn (even though I, like them, have my own research deadlines to meet).

Bridging the Continental-Analytic Divide

“Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound study of these two topics.  Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid serious attention to Heidegger’s book. The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers, whereas Heidegger is a continental philosopher.  Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly.  A famous debate between Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s ‘obscurantism’ and Derrida mocking Searle’s ‘superficiality.’” - Gary Gutting, “Bridging the Analytic-Continental Divide” on the NY Times Philosopher’s Stone Blog, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=120735

A further note: Melvin Bragg recently, and very helpfully, discussed this same issue on BBC4’s In Our Time, “The Continental-Analytic Split,” http://bbc.in/xpNjbt

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia

“So I removed the line about there being ‘no evidence’ and provided a full explanation in Wikipedia’s behind-the-scenes editing log. Within minutes my changes were reversed. The explanation: ‘You must provide reliable sources for your assertions to make changes along these lines to an article.’ That was curious, as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress.” - “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia” on The Chronicle: http://bit.ly/w7vr55

Morricone with the ACO

Every few months the Australian Chamber Orchestra makes its way to Newcastle’s Civic Hall. Last night, the second score performed was Ennio Morricone’s Esercizi for 10 Strings No. 1.  It begins in seemingly monist unity, all musicians playing the same notes precisely together. Eventually, one by one, each pauses before playing their own fragmented versions of a passage from Verdi’s La Traviata. They play very similar scaling lines, but independently of each other in what eventually amounts to chaos. As Morricone puts it:

“I wanted to show that by taking a sequence of sounds (a melody), on the one hand respecting their original source, yet on the other hand distorting their original durations, altering the intervals and re-working the dynamics, the basic melody thereby loses its recognizability, and its original connotations are replaced by something new and very different.”

Then just as surprisingly, one by one, each musician pauses, before beginning to play long slow notes again, this time in harmony with each other. Utter sameness breaks into cacophony as each goes their own way, only for them all to come back together again in harmony.

The performance is as much seen as heard, as the fiddlers performed standing up, their bows sliding through the air together, utterly apart, and, then more subtly together again. I couldn’t help but think of it as a metaphor for other dramas I’ve seen played out. Maybe, Hegelian dialectic, which splits the divine in-itself into a for-itself only to sublate an in-and-for-itself. Or, the plot of a romantic comedy where initial attraction devolves into broken hearts, only to resolve itself again in a more honest love at the end.

In Manchester, there used to be a dingy cafe with £2 grease-bomb breakfasts and gigantic windows perfect for people watching the world of passers by on Oxford Road. Most people sleep and wake up with much the same routine, I suppose. But by the time they head out into public, they’re at odds with one another. It appears to be a chaotic menagerie of dress, movement, posture, as people step off buses or navigate pedestrian walkways. But every so often, a couple, unknown to each other, leap a puddle synchronously, as if performing a ballet. Or, noticing they’d chosen the same bit of fashion from Zara or H&M, two girls fight back an embarrassed grin.

I wondered if Morricone had such a people watching breakfast as he wrote the Esercizi. In any case, it reminded me of how out of unities and chaos, life’s subtle harmonies emerge.

A Tale of Metaphysics and Mystery

“Still, all of the philosophers I spoke with made a point of emphasizing how much they admire the spirit behind A.M. Monius’s attempt to help revive metaphysics. They applaud his intellectual commitment, not just his financial one. Zimmerman notes that modern philosophers have rarely had patrons in the way that thinkers like Gottfried Leibniz once did. And though it’s true that Roderick Chisholm was for a short time supported financially by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, wealthy inventor of the medicine Argyrol, in few such cases does the apparent benefactor also serve, as A.M. Monius does, as the chief philosophical instigator and problem poser.”

“Would that there were more nonprofessionals who got jazzed about philosophy!” Zimmerman exclaims. With palpable excitement, he ponders the possibility that the institute might back “slightly broader projects, like a research center”—or better yet, he adds in jest, “support the Mayhem!”

- James Ryerson, “Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician,” Slate, (Republished from Lingua Franca) - http://slate.me/wdtUnQ

On Habits of Mind

“You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts or habits; for the art of expression, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time; for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and mental soberness.”

- Erwin Griswold, Dean of Harvard Law School, cited in, “The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/xsx2OC

On Legal Definitions of Religion

A comment on “The Church,” as defined in the recent US Supreme Court case, Hosanna-Tabor:

Most significantly, though, in the current moment, is that there is arguably no analogy to “the church” in its mystical sense outside Christianity. While other religious communities speak of the body of the faithful in various ways, the Court’s opinion would seem to suggest that its doctrine is tightly and very specifically bound to a history of the Christian church and its assertions of its rights in the context of a particular reading of English history.

- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Immanent Frame Blog, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=28788

Commandments for Writing

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Henry Miller, a Writer’s 11 Commandments - http://bit.ly/wn5mN7

On Work

“If you are unhappy with your writing process, sure, go ahead, make an effort to change it. Give yourself intermittent deadlines and take them seriously. Do whatever you need to do to meet them, whether it’s by having a friend check up on you or by rewarding yourself with a tasty treat when you finish something. Try it for three months. See if it makes your life better. If it doesn’t, then I would say there isn’t a problem. Accept that you are a last-minute person and realize this: Writing is hard, no matter when you do it. Thinking that there’s a better, easier way is just silly.”

Accepting the way you work: http://bit.ly/yEW1O3