Philosophical notes…
The Thingy-ness of Books
“Seriously, much is to be gained by ebooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness, a little bit of humanity. Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing he would get a copy of one of his new books with Alfred A Knopf? He would smell it. Then he’d run his hands over the ragged paper, and the pungent ink, and the daggled edges of the pages. All those years all those books he never got tired of it. Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me, smelling it will get you nowhere.” –Chip Kidd: Designing Books is No Laughing Matter. Ok, it is. On TED: http://bit.ly/HiUyyB
Charles Taylor Interview
Charles Taylor interview on his new book, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience: “The original model of secularism was one in which a very dominant religious group had to fight with other kinds of tendencies. That was the situation in France in the 19th century but it doesn’t at all describe modern-day Canada or the UK. The kind of secularism [advanced in the book] answers the question, ‘How do we live together?’” - http://bit.ly/AAAs5I
The cost of homelessness
The cost of homelessness: “We learned that you could either sustain people in homelessness for $35,000 to $150,000 a year, or you could literally end their homelessness for $13,000 to $25,000 a year,” he said. - http://bit.ly/ySAORx
The Atheist Fatwa
“De Botton finds it bewildering, the unexpected appearance in the culture of a tyrannical sect, content to whip up a mob mentality. ‘To say something along the lines of “I’m an atheist; I think religions are not all bad” has become a dramatically peculiar thing to say and if you do say it on the internet you will get savage messages calling you a fascist, an idiot or a fool. This is a very odd moment in our culture. Why has this happened?’” - “The God Wars,” The New Statesman http://bit.ly/xUQMw4
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:
- We’re often lectured about subjects that seem irrelevant to our lives
- 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:
- 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,
- 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.