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Middle Earth various issues, 1967-1968

Page 8

Ho-Io will hoo-doo you

During the three semesters I've taught Rhetoric at the University of Iowa I have discovered the following things: 
--Freshmen and sophomores are almost universally bored with almost all their classes.
--They accept boredom as an unavoidable fact of academic life, of the essence of education; they expect nothing else.
--Over half of the eighty students I have known feel that they are forced to go to school. Draft, parents, etc., but most often it’s ‘You’ve got to have a good job, don’t you, and…’ And how can you get meaningful work or an opportunity to create, maintain self-respect and earn the love and regard of other men if you don’t have a diploma to say who you are?

   Okay, so let’s abolish the draft, re-order economic society, and award technical jobs on the basis of demonstrable merit rather than credentials. Meanwhile, what about here, at Iowa, our not yet classless society. The most dramatic thing I found out from those eighty people is that those who were too bored with their schoolwork to work on it, or too stiff in the backbone to lick comfortably in the appropriate places, all felt guilty about it. A vaguely Freudian idea: you can’t adjust -- what’s wrong with you? You should adjust. Push harder. Bend lower. And if you still can’t, you go to see a ‘shrink’. Meanwhile the university tools its way along, a kind of self-regenerating machine. You ride it or you don’t. If you pick your destination carefully perhaps it will get you closer.

   You cannot steer because the university is not connected to anything. Bob Lehrman said in the Iowa Defender (10½16): ‘There are too many guys in Rhetoric who think they have to push Black Power or argue against the War or send kids to every cultural event they think is worth paying to see.’ (‘When they should be teaching Rhetoric.’) Teaching Rhetoric, meanwhile, is often accomplished by means such as this, which I found on the board in an empty classroom in EPB: ‘Prepare for tomorrow a list of 25 metaphors. Avoid obvious clichés…’ This is not a stupid assignment. One would want students to be able to handle metaphor, to distinguish imaginative from trite language. But what ATTITUDES are being learned along with these abilities? The metaphors are disconnected. They’re not about anything. They are gadgets, not even tools. Things good gwritin should have. One imagines the next assignment: ‘Bring in a paper with 25 metaphors in it.’ ‘Bring in three introductory paragraphs.’ ‘Bring in a half dozen dramatic finales.’ One learns to write papers like one should. Keeps his nose clean (?). Hopes for a C in the course.

   No wonder. Such assignments, even if successful (which is doubtful), teach techniques, and the writing of ‘good’ papers, as ends in themselves. They are used so effectively in high school that for many freshmen it is already too late. When I started with Rhetoric 10.2 I tried to keep assignments as open-ended as possible to allow the students, as I told them too, to work on problems which for them were interesting or important. In the first group of papers I think there were six about abolishing the electoral college.

   Nor is it just freshmen, as anyone knows who has sat through the unending presentations of the average graduate seminar. Even the poets of the Writers Workshop seem to me to specialize in excellently literary poems they don’t really care about. Students, for the most part, have simply never seen a classroom used to explore problems that meant anything to them. One boy told me last week that he had a hard time studying ‘academically’ because what really interested him was people, and why they act the way they do. He had most trouble with a history course.

   Some teachers are lazy, and it’s relatively easy just to teach techniques. But many others, who do, in their own work, know the university as an excellent tool for finding out what they want to know and discovering new things worth looking into, feel guilty if they teach this way.
   At the end of the semester I graded speech exams for someone else’s class. Three people gave almost identical talks, not referring to one another. A fourth disagreed with them on every point, but no one in the room was aware of this but me. They were doing speeches, rather than trying to tell us something.

   I call this the Howard Johnson Mind. The primary duty is not to offend, not to be unfair. The dominant myth is ‘objectivity.’ One must examine controversial questions from both sides, pointing out the pros and cons of each position, etc., etc. Insofar as this means ‘don’t brainwash people,’ admirable. But it’s frequent result, like the metaphor assignment, is to turn ‘controversial questions’ (or poems) into a kind of game one plays with more or less skill. But poems are written by people, and controversial questions are questions teachers care about. To pretend otherwise is to lie. Moreover it is to teach that great literature is something you’ve ‘got to learn’, that the individual in society is a kind of philosophers puzzle, and that the Vietnam war is an intellectual exercise (if not a football game).

   There are teachers who wonder why students don’t take them more seriously, yet scrupulously avoid approaching their subjects in a way they could take seriously themselves. Meanwhile students learn techniques they can operate with but don’t know how to use for anything, and think something’s wrong with them if their bored. It’s not just a maladjustment in the machinery, nor even a uniquely university problem. Perhaps it’s typical of our free and happy society that students all recognize that learning-for-exams isn’t learning, but are in such real fear for their futures that they cannot do otherwise. Or that they do not recognize that writing to please a teacher, rather than being honest with themselves, is a form of prostitution.
Paul Kleinberger

Headbust cont.
earth everything from the basic tenants of revolution to the innate evil of capitalistic society. It is not enough that they have a number of people involved in a compelling issue. They expect these people to now become fully enlightened political entities, and they are there with a great amount of intellectual baggage to bring about this enlightenment. Monica says she is tired of being lectured to. She would like to know what can be done to get the cops off campus. She feels that cops are an issue and that brutality is an issue, and she does not think these things are trivial.
   We finish our coffee and hitch over to the teach-in. There are about 300 people there; everyone looks tired. On the stage are a dozen or so leaders and they take turns telling everyone how they have to understand this thing and some sort of greater context. Some of them want to split up into groups for instruction in a number of areas listed on the blackboard. They hash over the possibility of splitting for about an hour. Every so often someone gets up and says they are tired of the lectures; they would like to do something. A teaching assistant gets up and says that some of his friends have been fired for their involvement, he has been threatened, thirteen students have been suspended. He would like to do something about that. He has to go somewhere now, but he will meet anyone who is interested downstairs at 11:30.
   We go back to the union to wait for that meeting. The union is filled with very tense people. They are people who are fantastically involved; they were beaten, tear-gassed, but they will not spend a night being lectured to on political abstractions their leaders think they should understand. Other kids there are circulating petitions; they do not know if they are liberals or radicals, but the police have clearly gone too far, they say, something must be done about the cops!
   We hitch back to the 11:30 meeting, but the assistant doesn’t come back, and no one else shows up. Monica asks me if I have a place to stay, and I don’t, so we go back to the dorm. Her roomate is there, a very straight girl in an athletic jersey with her hair in curlers. She has been worried about Monica, she wants to know if they have decided what to do yet. Other girls come in. Nice girls, all-American types, freshman sorority pledges, they are concerned too. They want to know when there is going to be some way to show their concern, their horror at what has happened to one of them.

   We get ready for bed, and Monica is exhausted, but I can’t sleep. So I just lie there and think about the tremendous wealth of emotion and concern that is frustrated all around me, but the nice all-american types who are suddenly confronted with a friend down the hall who has been bashed by a cop, about the kids in the union with the petitions who will no longer stand for what is happening and about Monica who is suddenly faced with the overwhelming reality, politically inarticulate though it may be, of what it is to be unmercilessly beaten by the men she has been taught since childhood are the symbol of order in her just society. And I cannot understand how the political leaders can ever expect all these people to sympathise with the peasants who are napalmed by Dow in Vietnam when they deny the relevance of their peers who are clubbed by Dow on their own campus. And I cannot understand their thinking that these people who have been so crucially involved could be so naïve as to fail to gain a real understanding of the overall view in the active working out of their very real part in it.

Defectors cont.
   ‘He was given clothing and a hat to disguise him from the people who were searching for him was floodlights,’ she added.
   ‘He was completely hidden from view and I don’t know what happened to him afterwards.’ The recollection of William Adams of Temple University was similar.
   Bob Zanger, a student at CCNY, and a witness to a different defection at a different part of the line, stated:
   ‘I was sitting in the front line in the center mall. Right next to me was a line of MPs. We heard a shout. I stood up and I saw a cat running toward us from the first line of paratroopers. I saw a helmet and rifle on the ground.
   Zanger, Mike Speigel of the SDS National office in Chicago, Mike Barton, Editor of the Boston College Heights, and this reporter witnessed a helmetless soldier being marched to the paddy wagon behind the troops’ front line. Each of the latter three happened to be standing on a raised platform at the time.

[Insert]
KENNEY’S BEER
Imported and domestic

Saving...

Ho-Io will hoo-doo you During the three semesters I've taught Rhetoric at the University of Iowa I have discovered the following things: --Freshmen and sophomores are almost universally bored with almost all their classes. --They accept boredom as an unavoidable fact of academic life, of the essence of education; they expect nothing else. --Over half of the eighty students I have known feel that they are forced to go to school. Draft, parents, etc., but most often it’s ‘You’ve got to have a good job, don’t you, and…’ And how can you get meaningful work or an opportunity to create, maintain self-respect and earn the love and regard of other men if you don’t have a diploma to say who you are? Okay, so let’s abolish the draft, re-order economic society, and award technical jobs on the basis of demonstrable merit rather than credentials. Meanwhile, what about here, at Iowa, our not yet classless society. The most dramatic thing I found out from those eighty people is that those who were too bored with their schoolwork to work on it, or too stiff in the backbone to lick comfortably in the appropriate places, all felt guilty about it. A vaguely Freudian idea: you can’t adjust -- what’s wrong with you? You should adjust. Push harder. Bend lower. And if you still can’t, you go to see a ‘shrink’. Meanwhile the university tools its way along, a kind of self-regenerating machine. You ride it or you don’t. If you pick your destination carefully perhaps it will get you closer. You cannot steer because the university is not connected to anything. Bob Lehrman said in the Iowa Defender (10½16): ‘There are too many guys in Rhetoric who think they have to push Black Power or argue against the War or send kids to every cultural event they think is worth paying to see.’ (‘When they should be teaching Rhetoric.’) Teaching Rhetoric, meanwhile, is often accomplished by means such as this, which I found on the board in an empty classroom in EPB: ‘Prepare for tomorrow a list of 25 metaphors. Avoid obvious clichés…’ This is not a stupid assignment. One would want students to be able to handle metaphor, to distinguish imaginative from trite language. But what ATTITUDES are being learned along with these abilities? The metaphors are disconnected. They’re not about anything. They are gadgets, not even tools. Things good gwritin should have. One imagines the next assignment: ‘Bring in a paper with 25 metaphors in it.’ ‘Bring in three introductory paragraphs.’ ‘Bring in a half dozen dramatic finales.’ One learns to write papers like one should. Keeps his nose clean (?). Hopes for a C in the course. No wonder. Such assignments, even if successful (which is doubtful), teach techniques, and the writing of ‘good’ papers, as ends in themselves. They are used so effectively in high school that for many freshmen it is already too late. When I started with Rhetoric 10.2 I tried to keep assignments as open-ended as possible to allow the students, as I told them too, to work on problems which for them were interesting or important. In the first group of papers I think there were six about abolishing the electoral college. Nor is it just freshmen, as anyone knows who has sat through the unending presentations of the average graduate seminar. Even the poets of the Writers Workshop seem to me to specialize in excellently literary poems they don’t really care about. Students, for the most part, have simply never seen a classroom used to explore problems that meant anything to them. One boy told me last week that he had a hard time studying ‘academically’ because what really interested him was people, and why they act the way they do. He had most trouble with a history course. Some teachers are lazy, and it’s relatively easy just to teach techniques. But many others, who do, in their own work, know the university as an excellent tool for finding out what they want to know and discovering new things worth looking into, feel guilty if they teach this way. At the end of the semester I graded speech exams for someone else’s class. Three people gave almost identical talks, not referring to one another. A fourth disagreed with them on every point, but no one in the room was aware of this but me. They were doing speeches, rather than trying to tell us something. I call this the Howard Johnson Mind. The primary duty is not to offend, not to be unfair. The dominant myth is ‘objectivity.’ One must examine controversial questions from both sides, pointing out the pros and cons of each position, etc., etc. Insofar as this means ‘don’t brainwash people,’ admirable. But it’s frequent result, like the metaphor assignment, is to turn ‘controversial questions’ (or poems) into a kind of game one plays with more or less skill. But poems are written by people, and controversial questions are questions teachers care about. To pretend otherwise is to lie. Moreover it is to teach that great literature is something you’ve ‘got to learn’, that the individual in society is a kind of philosophers puzzle, and that the Vietnam war is an intellectual exercise (if not a football game). There are teachers who wonder why students don’t take them more seriously, yet scrupulously avoid approaching their subjects in a way they could take seriously themselves. Meanwhile students learn techniques they can operate with but don’t know how to use for anything, and think something’s wrong with them if their bored. It’s not just a maladjustment in the machinery, nor even a uniquely university problem. Perhaps it’s typical of our free and happy society that students all recognize that learning-for-exams isn’t learning, but are in such real fear for their futures that they cannot do otherwise. Or that they do not recognize that writing to please a teacher, rather than being honest with themselves, is a form of prostitution. Paul Kleinberger Headbust cont. earth everything from the basic tenants of revolution to the innate evil of capitalistic society. It is not enough that they have a number of people involved in a compelling issue. They expect these people to now become fully enlightened political entities, and they are there with a great amount of intellectual baggage to bring about this enlightenment. Monica says she is tired of being lectured to. She would like to know what can be done to get the cops off campus. She feels that cops are an issue and that brutality is an issue, and she does not think these things are trivial. We finish our coffee and hitch over to the teach-in. There are about 300 people there; everyone looks tired. On the stage are a dozen or so leaders and they take turns telling everyone how they have to understand this thing and some sort of greater context. Some of them want to split up into groups for instruction in a number of areas listed on the blackboard. They hash over the possibility of splitting for about an hour. Every so often someone gets up and says they are tired of the lectures; they would like to do something. A teaching assistant gets up and says that some of his friends have been fired for their involvement, he has been threatened, thirteen students have been suspended. He would like to do something about that. He has to go somewhere now, but he will meet anyone who is interested downstairs at 11:30. We go back to the union to wait for that meeting. The union is filled with very tense people. They are people who are fantastically involved; they were beaten, tear-gassed, but they will not spend a night being lectured to on political abstractions their leaders think they should understand. Other kids there are circulating petitions; they do not know if they are liberals or radicals, but the police have clearly gone too far, they say, something must be done about the cops! We hitch back to the 11:30 meeting, but the assistant doesn’t come back, and no one else shows up. Monica asks me if I have a place to stay, and I don’t, so we go back to the dorm. Her roomate is there, a very straight girl in an athletic jersey with her hair in curlers. She has been worried about Monica, she wants to know if they have decided what to do yet. Other girls come in. Nice girls, all-American types, freshman sorority pledges, they are concerned too. They want to know when there is going to be some way to show their concern, their horror at what has happened to one of them. We get ready for bed, and Monica is exhausted, but I can’t sleep. So I just lie there and think about the tremendous wealth of emotion and concern that is frustrated all around me, but the nice all-american types who are suddenly confronted with a friend down the hall who has been bashed by a cop, about the kids in the union with the petitions who will no longer stand for what is happening and about Monica who is suddenly faced with the overwhelming reality, politically inarticulate though it may be, of what it is to be unmercilessly beaten by the men she has been taught since childhood are the symbol of order in her just society. And I cannot understand how the political leaders can ever expect all these people to sympathise with the peasants who are napalmed by Dow in Vietnam when they deny the relevance of their peers who are clubbed by Dow on their own campus. And I cannot understand their thinking that these people who have been so crucially involved could be so naïve as to fail to gain a real understanding of the overall view in the active working out of their very real part in it. Defectors cont. ‘He was given clothing and a hat to disguise him from the people who were searching for him was floodlights,’ she added. ‘He was completely hidden from view and I don’t know what happened to him afterwards.’ The recollection of William Adams of Temple University was similar. Bob Zanger, a student at CCNY, and a witness to a different defection at a different part of the line, stated: ‘I was sitting in the front line in the center mall. Right next to me was a line of MPs. We heard a shout. I stood up and I saw a cat running toward us from the first line of paratroopers. I saw a helmet and rifle on the ground. Zanger, Mike Speigel of the SDS National office in Chicago, Mike Barton, Editor of the Boston College Heights, and this reporter witnessed a helmetless soldier being marched to the paddy wagon behind the troops’ front line. Each of the latter three happened to be standing on a raised platform at the time. [Insert] KENNEY’S BEER Imported and domestic