Meena Hasan, here.
(1) It's Sunday, blah-blah Sunday here in Oberlin; sounds like a good day for a morning update!
From a post entitled "Modern conservative debate strategies, such as they are" by Scott Kaufmann over at Acephalous:
As you know, the classic tu quoque works like this:
Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.In this example, Person Y tries to undermine the argument of Person X by calling him a hypocrite. This is, obviously, a fallacy. But in a world in which people stand by SASQUATCH ISRAEL, the only way to improve a fallacious argument is, it seems, to double down on it. The reverse tu quoque, then, goes something like this:
Person Y: But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!
Person X: It should be illegal to put babies on spikes.
Person Y: (putting a baby on a spike) But I just saw you put a baby on a spike!
Here's the example made more concrete (by me!)
(Some) Democrats: We should decrease the deficit.
Republicans: (railing about the need to extend the Bush tax cuts on the top income bracket) But in the past, you've supported things that would increase the deficit!
It would be funny if, you know, they weren't serious.
(2) Apparently, no one really like unions anymore--especially teachers' unions. Indeed, even many on the left have soured on unions in general and, to a greater degree, teachers' unions.
Now there are, I suppose, a number of good and interesting debates that one could have about teachers' unions, but there's something odd about people on the technocratic left--who believe, by and large, that merit pay would be a good way of increasing student test scores--beating up on teachers' unions, whose express purpose is to provide increased pay and benefits for teachers.
Ezra Klein half makes this point:
A lot of the people who think money is important for teachers also hate teacher's unions. Those unions, of course, make teaching a more attractive job with better wages and conditions, and that should increase the quality of the talent. Now, it so happens that teaching isn't incredibly lucrative, but that's a question that more about the pay level than about whether unions impose too much pay equality.
If I'm reading that right, then Ezra Klein--a member of the technocratic left if ever there was one--is making my point for me. Ad to this Mayor Fenty's (who, by the by, was an Oberlin grad) crushing defeat in D.C., and maybe there's something of a sea change coming.
Or maybe not. And even though I'm deeply skeptical of the sort of reforms pushed by the technocratic left, I'm equally wary of doing nothing.
I'll let Nicholas Lemann (who wrote the "comment" on school reform in the latest New Yorker take me out:
Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah's Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true--especially before acting on it.
(3) This semester, I'm the Writing Associate for a First-Year Seminar (an FYSP in the Oberlin parlance). It's fun. I've been a writing tutor for the last three years, but before now, I've always worked in the Writing Center. This is the first time I've spent my time working for just one class, which has certain advantages (and disadvantages).
One of the advantages this time around is that I've been able to see firsthand the obsession that first-years seem to have with the driest kind of five paragraph essay: a fractal structure in which each paragraph includes five sentences that follow the same structure as the essay itself.
This group of freshmen seem to care--at the expense of most anything else--about the structure of the paragraph. You end up with a disjointed essay with five very discrete and unconnected units.
What's more, the theses themselves are timid, and the essays that follow aren't so much arguing something as pointing something out. When pressed, my first-years have claimed that this is what college-level academic essays should be, something that, in my experience, just isn't true.
In contrast, their informal essays are fearless and flowing; the ease with which they talk about themselves and their feelings on a given subject is amazing.
Questions: @Bubblegum Aesthetics: Am I crazy, or have you noticed this too? @Word Savvy: Can I blame standardized tests? @No One In Particular: Might the perceived yawning gap between informal and formal essays--and the facility with the former and the difficulty with the latter--come from the rise of "informal" modes of writing (viz. blogs, texts, tweets, Facebook updates, emails, etc.), modes of writing that used to fall under the providence of orality?
Of course, I should note that I do it too. That is: I blog. I email. I often write fractal and dry essays.
This is, I suppose, the "Tu Croque" Edition.
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