Recently I experienced one of those moments. You know, like the dream that you’re on stage during what you thought was a read-through but turns out the audience had paid and was expecting a full-on performance. And you look down and you’re in your underwear, too, and it’s not even the lacy expensive kind. “Embarrassment” doesn’t come close to articulating the emotional response I’ve witnessed in myself and I’m trying to do two things here: 1) figure out what’s really going on inside of me; and 2) get a handle on it. Because getting a handle on it is a means of declaring my self-worth in spite of the indifferent world I do not understand and have never understood. As I’m half dead already (at least) this understanding appears genuinely beyond me. I’m unsure the extent to which it matters.
Shipka’s “Whole” Composition
Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh University Press, 2011. Print.
The Montessori Method (1912) pt II
Chapter II
Two Thoughts on Mark Bauerlein’s “What’s the Point of a Professor?”
This morning I awoke to my uncle’s forwarding of Mark Bauerlein’s Opinion piece in yesterday’s NYTimes. The article surprised me, not so much because of its complaints–complaints about apathetic university students and corporate administrators (complaints echoing Thomas Lounsbury’s complaints about “Compulsory Composition” in 1911)–but because of its tired waxing poetic about “how things used to be.”