Three Beautiful Things 08/06/08: Juniper Pizza, Coffee at Theo's, Juicy Huckleberry

1. Juniper delivers pizza for Eugene's Cozmic Pizza and I ran into her as she was heading out for a delivery and we hadn't seen each other for a while and embraced and did some shorthand getting caught up.

2. Jeff and Margaret and I had coffee at Theo's Coffeehouse and discussed the virtues and failings of "No Country for Old Men" among other things. Our conversation was riveting. Time flew.

3. I am happy to learn that DFO at HBO will be using what I wrote about visiting Kellogg, Oregon, here, in his Huckleberries column in the Handle Extra in the Spokesman Review.

Teaching English Composition and the Jessica Bryan Controversy

I've been giving a lot more thought to the Jessica Bryan controversy at North Idaho College. It's been on my mind because I have some reason to believe that D. F. Oliveria is going to rip Jessica in an upcoming column.

If I were writing an editorial about the situation, here is what would be on my mind, given my profession, what I know about the situation, and what I know about the work Jessica Bryan and I do.

Linda Cook, the student who was refunded her tuition, stated publicly that she thought Jessica Bryan was a good teacher. I think her words were "she has a gift". She also said that it was comments like the ones that have been attributed to Jessica Bryan that made her unhappy.

In this discussion, it seems to have been forgotten that before Linda Cook left Bryan's course, Bryan used one of Linda Cook's pieces of writing in class as a model of what good writing is. I don't know what Linda Cook wrote about in that piece of writing. I'd like to know. Whatever Linda Cook wrote about, Jessica Bryan was not suppressing it, but held it up as exemplary.

About teaching composition:
One of the most difficult challenges in teaching composition is that the course does not have a given subject matter to discuss or write about. The instructor generates subject matter. Some instructors have students read about current issues. The class discusses them and papers are generated by discussion. This can become political. As I've said before, as a teacher of composition for nearly thirty years now, I tend toward philosophical inquiry in my composition classes. I could imagine someone saying that I'm not teaching English, I'm teaching philosophy. I am teaching philosophy, but I think it generates the most thoughtful arguments and essays.

Next term, I will present my WR 123 course within the context of the American working class. We'll look at the history of unions, we'll read about work and its meaning in American society, I'll try to help students understand this subject matter from the perspective I gained as an employee at the Bunker Hill Company and the students will do research on work and economic/social class related questions.

I've taught research within this context for five or six years now. It's riveting. It's political. It's historical. It's sociological. It's psychological. It's literature. It's film studies. It's interdisciplinary. Compostition classes must be interdisciplinary.

In the class I just described and in my other classes, the floor is open for spouting off. But the work only begins with spouting off. Assumptions have to examined. Support for one's opinions, including mine and my team teacher in the research class must be examined.

If we discuss political liberalism, we have to examine and research what the world looks like from this point of view and what it means if someone subscribes to this point of view.

Likewise political conservatism.

An awful lot of us who teach critical thinking and composition do not present these political and social and philosophical questions as either/or matters. They are complicated and it's our job, when we are doing our job well, to complicate what our students say, what we read, and to encourage our students to complicate what we as teachers say.

I don't know from what's been written about Jessica Bryan whether she said, after spouting off that Republicans should be executed, something like, "Now does that assertion work?"

Did she ask the class something like, "What's wrong with what I just said?" Or did she ask, "What's your response to that?"

I'd like to know. The spouting off is not in context. We just know that Linda Cook didn't like things Bryan said. We do know that Bryan used Cook's writing in class as a good model of writing.

If Bryan's absurd assertions couldn't be challenged; if they went unexplored and unexamined; and if her absurd assertions in any way implicitly implied or explicity stated that someone researching and writing from a point of view contrary to these could not earn a high grade in the course, then I think a serious problem existed in this course.

If students were free to challenge these absurd assertions, free to develop and write researched essays that supported any perspective they wanted, and if this work was evaluated with Jessica Bryan's attention focused on the way the paper supported and structured its thesis and how well it met the standards of documentation in an introductory research writing class, then, for the life of me, I don't see why Jessica Bryan would be in trouble.

If students had to conform to Bryan's views, if they were not being taught how to integrate research into their own arguments, if they were not being taught the fundamentals of documentation, then the English department has a problem with Jessica Bryan.

I was the assistant director of composition at the University of Oregon for a year. I was chair of the English, Foreign Language, and Speech division at Lane Community College for a year. Had Linda Cook come to me, I would have asked her if she was learning how to read critically, think critically, compose arguments, research, substatiate and complicate her own arguments through her research and how to document her work.

I hope the answer would be yes.

Then I would have a talk with Jessica Bryan and advise her to lay off the funny stuff and keep the political discourse respectful, unless she was trying to help her students understand satire.

By the way, after a year of dealing with kind of stuff as interim department chair, I learned that I love teaching too much to ever be an adminstrator!

Jessica Bryan: Classroom Satirist?

This post is a work in progress. Please read it as such. When I've settled on what I think, I'll remove this opening paragraph. Please feel free to comment.

I am trying to work out my insights and ideas about Jessica Bryan's situation. Here is one way I've thought about it.

A story has made the rounds about NIC English instructor, Jessica Bryan, who made polemical comments about Republicans and had a student demand her tuition be refunded (it was) and has been the recepient of strongly worded and threatening emails from those who take issue with her classroom comments.

Here's what Jessica Bryan is reported to have said: "Republicans should be executed. I believe in the death penalty. I love it. I think we should use it every day. First we line up everyone who can't think and right behind them, anyone who's ever voted Republican."

It's satire, in my opinion. It's not personal philosophy or opinion or words from a pulpit.

The outageous first sentence is hyperbole; the tradition of satire is built on exaggeration. She follows her hyperbole with an assertion "I believe in the death penalty" which could be taken at face value until she says, "I love the death penalty."

No one loves the death penalty, even those who support it. Only in satire does a person say they love it. Her expression of love is ironic, satirical, sarcastic, whatever you want to call it and the next two sentences further reinforce the exaggeration.

What's the purpose of satire? Well from Lysistrata to A Modest Proposal to Dr. Strangelove to Rush Limbaugh (does he really support machine gunning environmentalists? I don't think so...) to Michael Moore to Anne Coulter, the purpose of satire is to exaggerate a position, often the position of one's opponent, to provide social criticism, to shake us out of our typical ways of seeing things, and to make us think.

I watched the video tape of Anne Coulter when she used the word "faggot" recently.

I thought she was satirizing how Isiah Washington of Grey's Anatomy had gone to counseling for using the word "faggot" in a conflict with another actor.

Back to Jessica Bryan. Can the death penalty be satirized? Is what might seem to be too much social or political enthusiasm for capital punishment something an instructor can satirize in the classroom? And if she said this with a smile, isn't that an indication that she is being ironic or satirical? And if her comments were published out of context, isn't it possible that her ironic tone and satirical purpose, the rhetoric of her comments, was lost when reported in the newspaper and on blogs?

Likewise, Ann Coulter. When Ann Coulter says that she knows using the word "faggot" will land her in rehab (a paraphrase), isn't she satirizing a world of rehab or counseling or sensitivity training that has possibly gone out of control? I value therapy and I value knowing how words injure and I also see, and relish, how the culture of therapy and the policing of language is ripe for satire.

Ann Coulter is a smart alec. She pushed her satire pretty far, then, when she said she couldn't use the word "faggot" and so couldn't talk about John Edwards. Maybe there is a better way to satirize political policies that are not, in the world of Ann Coulter, manly.

As a Democrat and a fairly liberal one at that, I enjoy Ann Coulter's satire. With friends, I can be kind of an Ann Coulter myself and it gets tricky because it becomes double satire: I'll satirize something Coulter would satirize while, at the same time, satirzing Ann Coulter!!

If nothing else, Jessica Bryan has experienced, in a frightening way, something we English teachers often say when we teach satire: satire is flammable, unpredictable, prone to being read at face value, combustible.

Many times satire falls on tin ears. When it does, often the fit hits the shan.

I guess I'd have to say that I'm glad Mauer and Limbaugh and Coulter and Franken and Colbert and all the other satirists hang in there and keep our fooishness and follies before us, even as these satirists are attacked from every side as if everything they say should be taken at face value.

I have not been satirical in this post. Nor have I been ironic. Nor have I been sarcastic.

I want to defend the right of satire to be understood as the powerful rhetorical strategy it is and I wish we could all enjoy it more.

I know. When things are polarized, the first thing to go is a sense of humor.

Was it Freud who postulated that jokes and laughter usually mask unconscious hostility?

Damn him. It ruins all the fun. It greatly limits the field of what we can joke about.

Three Beautiful Things 02/18/07: Blogfest, Sabbath, Velcro Dog

1. Huckleberries Online celebrated its third anniversary in Coeur d'Alene at Capone's yesterday and today the pictures and video began to surface on blogs and at YouTube and even though I don't know these people personally, Huckleberries has been my lifeline to goings on in North Idaho and I loved seeing these people whose comments and blogs I read having so much fun. Congratulations to D. F. (Dave) Oliveria for overseeing such a vibrant blog and for gathering the kinds of people together who can jump his car battery when it dies. (In his excitement to get inside at Capone's, did DFO leave his lights on? If he did, that is just plain sweet.) Photos by Taryn: Mommie Dearest.

2. No schedule. Rest. Sorted out my del.icio.us bookmarks which got me back to thinking about some books I've ignored lately and got me listening to Playing in the Band and Uncle John's Band from the 6/23/90 Grateful Dead show at Autzen Stadium here in Eugene...if you were there, please tell me so in a comment.

3. Snug was velcro dog today. I've been so busy with the play and with work that I haven't been home for long stetches of time and today Snug stayed with me on the bed and was at my feet when I sat elsewhere. We'll have another day tomorrow together. I enjoy so much when I have hours in a row with him and today was the first such day in quite a while.