The World In A Thimble: Essay Ideas In Text Brains

Having figured out that my students are not able to sort out for a reader what voices are theirs and which aren’t, I decided to give them a 50-minute challenge.

Here’s the challenge:

Choose ONE of the following quotations.  Please write one paragraph in which you summarize the paragraph.  You may write your paragraph online or on paper. 

You are not being asked to argue for or against either quotation.  You are being asked to accurately summarize them and analyze them for a reader who hasn’t read them.  That is, tell an intelligent person in your own words what you have read and what he should know to understand it properly.

• “Judaism, along with Islam and Christianity,does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing.”  — Christopher Hitchens

• “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”  —Christopher Hitchens

I wasn’t surprised that they struggled.  All but one out of 25 students had to look up “emancipation,” “compulsory,” and “turgid.”  Hitchens is British Public School, and it shows; my students are not, and this also shows.  Most had to dig up the Wikipedia articles on Hitchens and Mother Teresa.

I was however a little depressed that 18-50 year olds with the right to vote simply could not do this assignment.  I don’t mean they did it badly.  I mean I read pure chaos.

A representative sample, produced after 50 minutes of reflection:

Mother Teresa was a very rich lady. Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor meaning she was friends with everybody. She just had done a lot for the poor which means for her to be friends of poverty she had to be in the state of mind of the poor to help.  

And another, one that gives sad clues into the writer’s own experiences but none into Christopher Hitchens’ point of view:

Mother Teresa, a woman with a pure mind that men are not a main objective. She is a woman of that has lesbian existence. People of poverty are always manipulated by others which leads them on, but in a since is a misdirection. Most women in poverty has kids without the father present in their lives. Mother Teresa must have been victim of being in a situation that has lead her to the point of taking action in a movement. She has dedicated her life to motivated women in ways that can be positive on a independence level.

Note that there is no recognition that anybody named Christopher Hitchens lives on planet earth or has commented on Mother Teresa.

The curve-wrecker runs:

Mother Teresa helped people who didn’t have anything or people who lived in poverty. She beleived going through hard times was something God did so you would become a stronger person. She wanted women to know what they stand for and that they are not only on this planet to have children or cater to men. Women have other values and should be able to tell a man if and when they are ready to have children. Women are not always appreciated for the things they do for men. It is very important to stand up for what you beleive in.

At least this one has some dim comprehension that reproduction is going on in Hitchens’ quotation, though of course it gets his argument backwards.

Only two students chose the one about scriptures: as one woman struggling with that one muttered, “I feel like I’m writing for the devil.”  (We had a brief and significant conversation about the fact that the serpent in Genesis tempts Eve precisely with the words, “Hath God said?”  We go on to discuss the fact that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is one that all of us who would have intellectual liberty have to bite for ourselves, or never bite at all.)

Those two responses were perhaps a bit better.  I think that they consciously wanted to distance themselves from Hitchens, and so pointed out his involvement: “Hey, this is his idea.” 

Christopher Hitchens is a British-American critic and author whom is outspoken and believes in facts and reason. Hitchens is a critic that tries to make you think like he does. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are three types of beliefs that Hitchens believes where written by humans. Hitchens says, “Judaism, along with Islam and Christianity are evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, is in fact the word of god.” He strongly believes, that God did not write the Bible, humans did.

After this little bloodbath, we discussed as a class the two quotations.  The one about scripture caused a lot of curiosity. 

I began by asking whether one is free to think hard about things that God has spoken on.  I had them construct a non-biblical case for “Thou shalt not steal,” and they did pretty well; then I had them construct a non-biblical case for “Put to death those who commit homosexual acts because they are an abomination.”   (Interestingly, most of the class knew what “abomination” means, though they could not define it.)  

That didn’t go so well, and so we talked about the fact that the religious often feel constrained to accept ideas that do not make reasonable sense.  In other words, “God said” trumps what we think and even shuts down what we think. 

I pointed out that there’s probably nothing wrong with that if God really did say a thing, but that we should acknowledge what we’re doing.  To accept “God said” is to begin by limiting intellectual freedom, as the story of the tempation of humankind in Genesis 2 and 3 makes clear.  Even if you can gin up a case from reason that homosexuality is not a good idea in some way, without your divine “Thus saith the LORD” you have more or less an ethical preference, not an abomination.  You might not like it, but you have no right to put it to death.  The Lex Talionis (retributive law) of the Hebrew Torah prescribes it; but it’s not enlightened.

And Jesus himself (in the Gospel of John: see John 8:1-11) felt inclined to suggest that the Torah was written in sand, hardly commensurate with the idea that it was the Word of God in any really serious or eternal sense.  The word of a god, maybe, but a god of tooth and claw, one to be shelved as better councils dictated.

And that brings me back to my students, and how at the end of this exercise I sat exhausted in the classroom with scribblings all over the board.  Outside the window  I could see little furtive figures scurry away from the local high school, bored, preoccupied with getting out of their work rather than doing it.  A messy sheaf of papers  lay in front of me, wreathed in confusion and disorder like the minds of my students when confronted with an idea that comes from the deep end of the pool.

“Give it to us in a thimble,” they begged me.  Well, what they said was, “Can’t you assign us an essay on our favorite food or something?”  They do ask for things like that.   One tells me suggestively that she once wrote a good paper in high school on her favorite R&B artist.  Could I assign something like that?

I guess I should.  These kids passed through urban high schools somehow.  They aren’t equipped to handle this stuff.   

And I find they are happiest when somebody tells them how to think and does not ask them what they think about it.

Comments

[Stephanie]

Yep, that's depressing all right.

I don't recall what classes you're teaching. Is this a remedial writing class? How much latitude do you have to teach what you think needs to be taught? The fundamental problem I've seen in your students' writing samples is not that they don't know how to write competently. They don't know how to think! If you could somehow teach them how to do that, you would be doing them one of the greatest favors of their lives. Could you take a page from Charlotte Mason and have them read, then narrate? Could you read to them in class, discuss the main ideas, then give them an essay for homework? (Is an essay too much? Maybe a paragraph?)

You've hinted before that many of them don't want to be in this class. But if they're in college, I think it's fair to assume they want to learn something, and to be able to succeed in life. Writing about their favorite foods won't get them where they want to go. Maybe one or two of them will have an epiphany and actually set themselves to learn to think. If they do, I know you can teach them a lot.

[Rowbean]

I was a product of that miserable public education. I'm still grateful for the brief amount of influence you and others have had on my ability/willingness to think. I'm still not great at it (or even GOOD) but there is clear improvement.

I believe we Americans generally prefer the easy way. We prefer being told what to think rather than coming to any real conclusions on our own and risking looking foolish for having a view that is different from the mainstream. It's hammered into us year after year that we should strive to be like everyone else. Assimilate! Dammit!

[Jennifer in AZ]

Now, I'm depressed. *sigh* And Jason wonders why I think public school isn't the best way to educate our children?

[Otter]

Stephanie, these particular ones are not remedial, though I also teach remedials.

Mason's "method" has some uses in the classroom, but with three hours a week in which to work, it's not practical to guide a hundred-odd students per term.

But you're right that thinking and language go together. To write is to think, and to tangle your grammar is to tangle your thinking.