September 25, 2018

Bill Cosby, the symbol of wise manhood once, sentenced to jail at the age of 81. Nothing better illustrates Fortune’s inexorable wheel.

Kavanaugh, who looked like a sure thing behind the shield of monsters such as McConnell, may have to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court. One would think even corrupt men could choose a guiltless one and avoid the sturm und drang, but like will cleave to like no matter what.

The President is laughed at in the UN General Assembly. At least publically he is too stupid to comprehend the humiliation. I want to live to hear him say the words “I am a failure. I am a buffoon whom the whole world either laughs at or reviles.”  Any variation on that would do.

Continued miraculous enthusiasm in my playwriting course.

This semester’s comprehensive exams the worst I’ve ever seen. Someone let them think they needn’t even try. It’s partially our fault. Lazy and irresponsible programs such as Humanities cynically allege that they are teaching “skills” rather than “knowledge.”  This gives students the idea that if they answer correctly the question “do you feel that you have a sense of the history and significance of (fill in the blank)” they actually have mastered that subject. That they have mastered anything. What I wrote to my colleagues:

OK, for what it’s worth, here is my take on the badness of the comps this semester. Part of it is rhythmic and passing; it was just an off semester. Part of it is we don’t get to transfer students quick enough to prepare them. Part of it is an attitude that has crept into education (not us, so much, but so prevalent all around us that it is hard not to be tainted) that we should be teaching skills rather than “things.” Theoretically, this is fine, but it is almost never what happens. When lazy or irresponsible programs (such as the current iteration of Humanities) say “we’re teaching skills” what is meant is that they have given up on teaching actual subject matter and are satisfied if the student can answer positively a set of vague and useless queries such “do you feel you have a general understanding of the course and significance of” whatever the issue is. “Teaching skills” sounds excellent in conversation, but as it manifests in this university at this time, it is an admission that one has given up on–or failed at–teaching subject matter. Of course we are tempted by the current assessment culture into framing things exactly that way. Since there is no real way to assess the value of writing, or understanding, a poem, for instance, a rickety fiction grows up in which the student is encouraged to assess her own feelings about her progress as a scholar. Do you have the skills necessary to understand “Leaves of Grass”? God forbid if she should ever be asked actually to EXPRESS or PROVE her understand or appreciation of it.  Details, facts, names and passages are thought of as being fussy or elite in some way, and to be done without if a student can be confident in an abstract air of attainment. To me, this is the deliberate avoidance of academic principles, wherein the general is ALWAYS founded upon and derived from the specific. You do not have a general feel for the Harlem Renaissance unless you can quote Langston Hughes. You have no general knowledge of the Roman Empire if you can’t speak specifically about at least a few emperors. You have no useful general understand of literature if you don’t know what century Tennyson wrote in or what a dactyl is. There is no skill without application. There is no understanding without specific analysis. I do not mean to be excoriating US, because I think we’re as blameless in this as you can be in a community given over to it. I mean to say it is our task to hold the line and teach the way we ought to, and not be dismayed if we are, from time to time, a shock to our students. That’s what we ought to be: a shock and a correction and an open door.