080918 Well here we are again. Again, I don’t want to do this, but again, I’m going to for some reason. How about let’s be Steve Geibel for a second and just put aside the reason, and put aside the whole weird-mongering fricasee of repeatedly asking banal questions about what words are and what text is and whether or not a work of “literature” is a “thing” or just a pattern, and whether or not its existence depends on the presence of a “sentience” that can “recognize” the pattern and how we think we know whether or not there’s any connection or community involved in all of that— because it’s basically getting to be like that funnel ride at the water park. It’s like, the more variations on these questions I ask myself, the more I just spin around and around back to “it is impossible to answer questions posed by your brain about your brain” and even though I’m by no means certain that’s “true” (whatever that means), it’s getting to be a bit, shall we say, just a bit boring. So let’s force ourselves to think and type and squiggle about something else for a while. OK. So, what then? Well, it doesn’t have to be interesting. It doesn’t have to be smart. It doesn’t have to be musical. It doesn’t have to be lyrical. It doesn’t have to be profound. It doesn’t have to be poetic. It only has to be “anything besides pure nonsense” and guess what? *I* get to decide what is and isn’t nonsense! So in other words, the only bullshit detector it has to pass is *my own.* This is obviously an honor system. This is obviously a situation where you can get an A just by giving yourself an A. Or you can pass the class without doing all the non-graded assignments, so who’s going to bother doing them? It would seem that some students will, and some won’t. It would seem that some teachers are completely stopped by that conundrum, while others don’t particularly see it as a conundrum at all. To the extent that you are a teacher because you are getting a paycheck for it— no, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Let’s see. Teacher 1, let’s call him Mr. Squiggles, says it’s not fair if two students can pass the class while having done vastly different “amounts” or “quality” of work. He sees a design defect in a class that has anything at all optional in it. If there’s a folder of “enrichment” or “optional activities” or “for further reading,” he’ll basically treat it as if it doesn’t exist, because for all intents and *tactical* purposes, it doesn’t. For him, the quality and success of the class’s design is measured by how tightly integrated each activity is with its corresponding assessment. If he’s really conscientious, he’ll try his best to consult the data and determine whether his assessments are valid. But either way, each element of the class, from the macro to the micro, has to be quantifiable, so that you can basically measure how many bricks each student selected and laid down, and how well they cemented them all together, and what the wall looks like at the end. Teacher 2, let’s call her Mrs. Quiggles (just because we’re basically still a spastic child at heart) has what at first seems like a more abstract, lofty, possibly pretentious view of what an effective class looks like. To her, the word “effective” has a kind of chromium gleam to it, an aluminum aftertaste that’s not necessarily to her liking every day. She gropes around for a better word... Exciting? Interesting? Inspiring? Surprising? God forbid, *creative* (she gives a little shudder)? But none of these words is easy to explain to the student or fellow teacher or administrator or (real or imagined) Member of the Public who pays property taxes to pay her salary, so she’s kind of been muddling through, content to only vaguely hold an image of them in her working memory, while constructing her classes in such a way that they at least outwardly look enough like Mr. Squiggles’ walls to pass muster. Meanwhile, she tosses and turns, occasionally being delighted by moments when it feels like she has felt a spark of the semi-articulated thing. She kind of thinks she’d like to build her classes a little like an author builds books: it’s all there; she’s laid it all out with love and fascination, sometimes even obsession. She’s learned that some of her assumptions were messed up; by interacting with readers (students) she’s learned some ways to revise. She’s still revising. She’s still trying to have conversations with people (students and other teachers etc) that are interesting enough to make her keep being energized and fascinated. She’s not pretending to like her subject matter. So she’s laid it all out there, and then she puts it out there, and you (the student) can read it if you want to. If you don’t, she’s not going to turn into a cop and bust your ass. She’s going to hope that next time, the thing she puts out there WILL catch your interest, but she accepts that there’s only so much she can do. But that doesn’t mean she’s not trying. It just means she’s not pandering. Sometimes she gets a little ahead of herself, she gets a little full of herself, and she attributes your lack of interest to some inherent deficiency on your part—not that—she means, everybody’s different—who is she to judge—but still—you know how it goes. But she’s lucky, because eventually some conversation or event or eye-opening interaction occurs that reminds her, humbles her in a non-fake sort of way. And then she’s able to go back to work for real. So she lays it all out there and you can read it if you want to, and you can skip parts if you want to, and you can add your own parts if you want to, and you have this back and forth, and it turns into a whole spider web where anyone can be the spider at any given time, and you have fun tying each other up like flies, but it’s catch and release because we’re all civilized here, sometimes dare she say it we’re even kind of *friends,* and so when you’re done reading it, you’ve, hopefully, learned something. She makes up some kind of a way to give you a grade.