“Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?” (Roman Jakobson, speaking on the prospect of hiring Vladimir Nabokov to Harvard.)

One of the abiding concerns of this blog is to defend the dignity of distinctly “academic” work. This is tantamount to defending the value of academic credentials (bachelor, master, professor, etc.), which, ideally, signal that the bearer possesses academic skills, which is to say, that the bearer is “knowledgeable” about a particular subject in some distinctive way. There are of course countless subject areas for you to pursue and I try to keep my advice general enough to apply to all of them (at least in the social sciences and humanities). “Inframethodology” is the name I give to my (sometimes morbid) interest in the sort of knowing that a university degree implies. It is of course possible to be good at poetry and finance without holding an academic post, but what I want to insist upon is that merely this “being good at it” does not in itself qualify you to hold one.

Whether you’re studying poetry or finance, you’re learning about something that also happens in real life. Indeed, even poetry and finance are themselves “about” something more “real”: poetry is about our emotions; finance is about our money. (Simplifying somewhat, poetry makes emotions available to people who might not otherwise have them. Finance makes money available to people who might not otherwise have it.) Now, my question is: how much can you learn about these things without actually doing them? How much can you learn about poetry without writing a poem? (How much can you learn about emotions without feeling them?) How much can you learn about finance without underwriting a bond? (How much can you learn about money without making any?) These, I want to say, are “academic” questions.

But they are by no means trivial issues. It is possible to know what a Shakespearean sonnet is without ever writing a single one. And it is possible to write one merely as an exercise, without any desire to be published or likelihood of being read. It is, similarly, possible to know what a collateralized debt obligation is without ever buying or selling a single one. It is possible to design one entirely “in theory”, for the sole purpose of passing an assignment and without any chance of earning a penny. None of this knowledge is worthless just because the student hasn’t tried it out in practice. And the student’s knowledge can be meaningfully tested in an exam situation.

As academics, I believe, we have to appreciate this particular kind of knowing. We can’t be ashamed of our distance to practice, the “knowing-doing gap”. We have to boast of our ability to name the working of parts of things we can’t build, to understand their history and purpose in culture, to implicate them in their social functions. A scholar of Elizabethan literature will be able to tell you, probably better than any working poet, how the sonnet has developed over the centuries and how this has affected the language we use to express ourselves.  A professor of finance can tell you not just what the legal structure of a CDO is but what role these instruments played in the financial crisis of 2007-8. You don’t have to be a Wall Street banker to understand the financial system. Indeed, like poets, I think our bankers may be a bit too “invested”, if you will, in what the rest of us make of their business to be entirely trusted. It’s a good thing we have academics to approach their products a bit more dispassionately.

(continued)

Writing is hard so that reading may be easy. I’ve written about the three main difficulties (one, two, three) that good scholarly writing helps the reader overcome, but there is a fourth one that is worth considering. It’s sort of “off the books” because I don’t think an academic writer should take it on very often. The issue should arise very rarely when writing about your research for your peers, and it should almost never be the focus of an entire article. But it is an interesting rhetorical problem that you do well to learn how to solve quickly and efficiently when it does come up. The fourth difficulty is boredom.

Sometimes the reader finds what you’re saying neither hard to believe nor hard to understand nor hard to agree with. You’re telling them something they already know. Why, then, as one scholar speaking to another, are you insisting on saying it? Precisely because this fact or event or theory, one that bores your reader to tears, is of great interest to you and your work. It is important in a way that the reader presumably does not see. So you have given yourself the task of asserting it and getting the reader interested in it again. You are not hoping to make it more credible or comprehensible or less contentious. It is in no need of evidence, explication or critical engagement. It’s just that your reader has forgotten why it matters or how exciting its backstory actually is. You’re here to remind them.

Like I say, you don’t want this to be the problem in every paragraph you write. Scholars should for the most part assume that their readers are interested in what they have to say. They are, after all, members of the same community, built around the same intellectual puzzles, studying similar materials, using methods they all understand and respect. If your reader isn’t interested they’re most likely not the right reader. You don’t want to have to use every paragraph to pique the reader’s interest or get their attention; the whole point of academia, of scholarship, is to establish and maintain a group of people who are predisposed, indeed, precommitted, to discussing a certain set of topics. This saves us a lot of time and rhetorical effort, and also, of course, explains why “the general public” finds “academic writing” a bit of slog to read. It presumes interest, or what we sometimes, albeit to my mind a bit too easily and a bit too cynically, call a “captive audience”.

But, because this audience is familiar to you, you are familiar with the way your reader’s eyes begin to glaze over at the mere mention of certain subjects. You understand why this happens because you understand how the information is usually presented, and to what rhetorical end. But you, who are just a little more knowledgeable about it, have seen something in it that your audience, if only they knew, would get just as excited about as you. So you tell the story, provide the statistic, or recount the history that revivifies the facts for others as they already have been for you. An important part of your competence to do this work lies in your understanding of why your reader is provisionally bored. Indeed, the more empathy you have with your reader on this point, the better able you will be to help them overcome the difficulty.

People sometimes tell me they have a hard time clearly distinguishing the three rhetorical postures of the paragraph: support, elaborate or defend. I usually correlate them with the three difficulties that your imagined reader might face when reading your key sentence out of the context of the paragraph. Will the reader find it hard to believe, hard to understand, or hard to agree with what you are saying? You should support it with evidence, elaborate your meaning, or defend it against the reader’s likely objections accordingly. Writing is hard, but only in order to make reading easier. You write a whole paragraph because you can’t, as a scholar, merely assert your claim. It is something a bit heavier than that, if you will, or a bit more subtle, or perhaps a little edgy. “Yes, yes,” the writer says, “I heard all that and I get it at an abstract level. But can you give an example?”

Here’s one that sometimes helps. My office, where I’m writing this, is on the third floor of a big, modern university building. Suppose I tell you, “There’s an elephant in the lobby.” Well, you might find that somewhat hard to believe. If so, I could show you some evidence of the elephant in the lobby. I could perhaps take some pictures or cite witness reports or upload a video of the panicked students fleeing the scene. Or I could show you the event poster of the circus holding its career day and say, “I know it sounds strange, but they decided to bring a baby elephant to draw a crowd.” There are lots of different ways to try move you from a state of disbelief about the elephant in the lobby to one of belief. Some of these could easily be carried out in a coherent prose paragraph that supports the key sentence “There is an elephant in the lobby.”

But notice that this only works if we assume you understood what I meant and that you were able to doubt my word. Suppose we invert these priorities; suppose you are predisposed to believing what I tell you. When I say, “There is an elephant in the lobby,” you experience a difficulty, but it’s not the difficulty of believing me. You assume it’s true; you want to believe. But the statement puzzles you. How could there possibly be an elephant in the lobby? What are you not understanding? At this point, I could explain that it is, in fact, a statue of an elephant that has been donated by the Carlsberg Foundation to the business school. (Like the real elephant, I should say, this one is also fictional. We don’t have a statue of an elephant in the lobby.) “Ah! I get it,” you say. Now you understand what I mean and it all makes sense. I took the key sentence and I elaborated on it and the puzzle has been solved, the difficulty, overcome.

Finally, let us suppose you have just walked through the lobby and seen a hippopotamus there. In this case, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a real one or a statue, but lets suppose that it is a piece of modern art that is ambiguous on this point. The important thing, however, is that you have experienced it yourself and have made up your mind, based on the evidence, that it is a hippopotamus. When I say, “There is an elephant in the lobby,” your difficulty is not one of believing or understanding me. You know exactly what I’m talking about but you can’t agree with me. And suppose, further, that I am also aware of your position (or the existence of a position like yours). I know what your arguments in favor of calling it a hippopotamus and not an elephant are. I can now spend my paragraph defending my interpretation of the block of granite against yours.

Keep in mind that a paragraph is only one minute of your reader’s experience. The key sentence should occasion a difficulty in the reader’s mind that can be resolved within that time. You have to be realistic about your ambitions. It’s not that the reader must end up believing you with firm conviction, only that your claim should have become more credible by the end of the paragraph. It’s not that the reader’s mind must be filled with pristine light upon your meaning, only that it should be less puzzling than when you began. Finally, don’t think you’re going to make your reader agree with you with a single paragraph. There are the rare cases  when you might know exactly what to tell the reader to change their mind, where you can point out, for example, that the sculpture you’re talking about was, in fact, called “The Elephant” by the artist (and the brass plaque on its base says so). But the normal case will simply be one of managing the disagreement itself, situating it in a larger argument. I hope that helps.

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To haters of the five-paragraph essay, please notice that this is a perfectly valid example of one. Why don’t you want to teach students how to make one of these?

“While a genuine lecturer must obey the rules of mental decency, and clothe his personal idiosyncrasies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels. This prospect cheers me, because I value freedom; and have never expected freedom to be anything less than indecent.” (E.E. Cummings)

I never tire of raving about Oliver Senior’s How to Draw Hands. He is enviably confident in his own abilities and proposes unblushingly to pass that ability on.  At one level, I share his confidence. If I was to write a book called How to Write Essays, I would boldly “assume authority to propose a readily available course of study” too. I’d feel like I knew what I was talking about, and there wouldn’t be a trick I wouldn’t feel able to demonstrate with an example of my own making. (Neither Senior nor I claim to be great stylists; we only recognize ourselves as competent, as experts in the craft, and we wouldn’t propose to instruct anyone if we didn’t.) But there’s another book I want to write, one that I think is more needed than a book about writing (of which there are many perfectly good ones). It would be called How to Know Things, and here I run into a bit of a problem. In fact, I run into a paradox.

Am I actually an expert-level “knower”? In a strictly formal, professional sense, I am not. I never did make tenure, abandoning an academic career in favor of this “alt-ac” gig as a writing consultant. This profession does have an associated academic discipline, namely, “composition studies” (and a number of related fields), but I am by no means a regular contributor to its literature. There are some things I like to think I know — about say, Wittgenstein or Hamlet — but I’m not sure my knowledge holds muster against the objections that could be raised by qualified scholars. I wouldn’t know how to defend myself if such people challenged my views. On most substantive matters, in literature, philosophy, politics, or science, I’m an amateur. There was a time when I thought I could hold my own with organization theorists, but a number of failed attempts to engage with that community have made me reconsider that project. These days I aspire only to be half as charming an ignoramus as E.E. Cummings.

In this pursuit, we have a very illustrious precursor. “In this world, confused by too much knowledge,” said Kierkegaard, “what we need is, not another system, but another Socrates!” (Okay, that’s actually two illustrious precursors.) Socrates famously said (or didn’t say, but no less famously) that he knew only that he knew nothing. This, then, was to make him wiser than those who didn’t know even this, but, aside from being a paradox, it of course assumed that no one actually knows anything, which seems a bit unlikely. A more plausible quote has him saying, “I know what I don’t know,” that is, he doesn’t kid himself or others that he knows something that he doesn’t actually know. And this, I think, is how I feel about most things.

There is, to be sure, still something of a critical edge in this statement.  Cummings isn’t exactly impressed with the “acceptable generalities” of the “genuine lecturer” and Socrates felt himself to be wiser than those who “fancy they know” things they don’t. But maybe that really is the wisdom we’re after. Perhaps the whole trick to knowing anything is recognizing what you don’t know; perhaps the bulk of our ignorance consists, not in having “no idea” about something, but in having false ideas about it. This certainly seems like the lesson of the “replication crisis” — the proliferation of overblown and underpowered “studies” that have led us to believe in “significant” effects that are simply artifacts of very noisy data. The ignorance that believing in these effects has caused is much greater than simply not believing them would have been.

In questions of representation — drawing hands and writing essays — Oliver Senior and I are willing to assert some measure of expertise. But even Senior cautions us to “hold our drawing back”, to let the whole picture emerge gradually, maintaining a sense of proportion between the parts. Carefully rendering what you see, or what you think, on paper is a good way to understand your limitations, to “appreciate your finitude”, as I sometimes put it. You can represent what’s in front of your face or on your mind quite accurately while still being somewhat unsure about how “real” it is, how well you’ve understood your world. Perhaps I don’t need to remind you of the dark arts that help us conceal these limitations: the art, if you will, of not knowing what you’re talking about. But real wisdom, and clear writing, comes from knowing when not to talk, knowing what you are not in a position to say. Knowledge consists of what remains after you honestly acknowledge your ignorance.

My last post didn’t occasion the engagement I had hoped for. But I did learn something new, namely, that there is something called “reality pedagogy”, which was developed out of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical pedagogy by Christopher Emdin (2011). Though native to urban primary and secondary science education in the United States, it is (my critics rightly point out) a direct challenge to my approach to the classroom. As far as I can tell, it is being embraced well beyond this narrow context and I would disagree with its application even there. What is at issue is the nature of the of classroom and, therefore, the nature of teachers and students. In this post I want to offer some initial reactions to mark the crux of the disagreement as I see it.

I think Emdin and I could agree to approach the problem in broadly “constructivist” terms. Students and teachers aren’t natural kinds, but social constructions, and the construction site, if you will, is the classroom. The classroom is defined by the positions we assign to students and teachers; students and teachers are, in turn, defined by how we organize the classroom. This is, in part, what I was after in my defense of “the academic situation”: I think the classroom is a good place for certain kinds of activities, it is a context within which students and teachers can be “good” at what they do, namely, learning and teaching, respectively. It is not the only place where “learning” goes on, however. It is only a particular setting for learning and, I fully grant, not ideal for learning everything. Certain objects of knowledge are easily constructed in a classroom, we might say, and others not so easily.

But Emdin doesn’t let what Berger and Luckmann famously called “the social construction of reality” go deep enough. He believes that, in a crucial sense, the students are a “reality” that is given to the teachers and that their first duty is to understand this reality as given, to get to know “where they are coming from”.  He rightly emphasizes that this cannot be known in advance of the students’ arrival in the classroom. That is, you can’t just operate with some general understanding of “urban youth” and treat every class, year in and year out, according to this caricature. But he does seem to harbor a great deal of optimism about building “camaraderie” between teachers and students and proposes to devote significant energies to this end. Indeed, he seems willing to explicitly place course “content” at the bottom of the list of priorities and devote a great deal of time to letting students teach their teachers who they are and how they might be best learn. “The student,” he declares, “[is] the expert at pedagogy (the person who knows most about how to deliver information to other students) while the teacher [is] the novice who is learning how to teach” (2011, p. 288).

Emdin, it should be noted, is an engaging and charismatic thinker. I have no doubt that he has inspired both teachers and students to reach beyond what they thought themselves capable of. In fact, if this is realism it might best described as magic realism. In one TED talk he argues that education students are too often mired in meaningless scholarship when what they really want to do is “spark magic and change lives”. This magic, he suggests, is a teachable, transferable skill and could be part of the curriculum of teacher education. Specifically, he suggests that aspiring teachers should develop a “Pentecostal” or “Hip-Hop” sensibility  by attending churches and concerts and learning from people who truly know how to engage their audiences.

I believe that this sort of pedagogy arrogates* at once too much and too little power to the classroom setting. Too much because it imagines that the “whole person” of the student can be constructed (re-constructed?) within the confines of the classroom; it demands that students leave no part of themselves, as it were, “at the door”. It then proposes to transform this whole person, of whom it expects, I suppose, a full, authentic engagement with the learning process. But it is also too quick to declare the classroom powerless to extricate the students from whatever social conditions might be interfering with their learning and to protect them from them. It doesn’t grant that the classroom can impose an “order” for the 45 minutes the class lasts, suspending the social chaos that the student might otherwise be embroiled in among friends and family. Instead, it lets all of that material into the classroom and takes it upon itself to leverage it in the learning process.

I think this is a fool’s errand. No matter how much time you devote to “co-creating” the classroom with your students, you will never fully understand who they are or whether they’re really getting what you’re trying to teach them. Indeed, your students aren’t a knowable reality at all. They are, I want to say, an ideality. We should always direct our instruction at “the ideal student”, the subject of a learning process that most effectively delivers the content that we, the teachers, not they, the students, master. The ideal student reads their homework and sits still in class and raises their hand when they have a question. They do their assignments and clean up after themselves in the lab. They take careful notes, they devote a measured but intense amount of themselves to trying to understand what you’re teaching them. I’m not addressing the “whole person” of the student in my classes. I only talk to them as though I have their full attention for 45 minutes.

The real magic of the classroom lies in the order it imposes willy-nilly on everyone that enters, not in the charisma of the teacher or the sincerity of the student. Pierre Bourdieu has a very useful concept of “social magic” which depends on the misrecognition of the conditions that produce the social categories we then take for granted as “real”. Think of a magic act which depends on the audience remaining seated for the duration of the performance. We have to obey this rule in order to enjoy the show; but we also have to forget that we are obeying it. Likewise, the student knows that the classroom is an artificial simulation of the real world of numbers and letters, forces and masses. But there is a moment, for some students while reading a poem, for others while solving an equation, for yet others while conducting an experiment, where the whole of reality seems to rush in and assert itself. After much struggle with a particular set of carefully chosen materials, the student finally gets it. The ideal student leaves that other “reality” at the door.

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*Update (26/02/2020): This was a poor word choice. Leaving aside its now obsolete senses, it implies that the power is unjustified. Not only is it needlessly confrontational to insinuate arrogance in the person you’re criticizing, I end up suggesting that we’d be justified in “arrogating”, i.e., justified in claiming without justification, a different kind of power in the classroom.