(no subject)

But are literary works directed against ephebes? Is the struggle just a phantom one, or a real one? (Or, anyway, two successive and complementary phantom ones?)

Or only in the sense that any engaged reader is an ephebe - the attempt is made to replace the reader's thoughts with what cannot be reformulated differently without loss, so that the text forever captures a feeling, so that this captivity is noticed whenever the feeling is felt, so that to remember the captivity is to remember the name of a writer?

I need to think there is more generosity here. Shelley (e.g.) wanted me to see the world his way because it was true and needful to do so, not just his. And even the most confident, intelligent authors are still asking you, aren't they: isn't it like this? Don't you find it's just this way? Or perhaps it just works out that way - the best thing you can say to be remembered is the truth. Anything else can be fought off, transcended; the best Poe could hope would be to speak to some stage almost everyone goes through. Immortality-seekers smarter than Poe wouldn't want that. It would feel like mere graffiti, like an honorary mention. To be remembered as teacher and friend would be remarkable.

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Put to writing that by the question of who is the demiurge, the precursor or ephebe? The ephebe becomes it in relation to the purer vision of the precursor, which she refuses to merely repeat but finds that she cannot improve on, therefore maims (reconstitutes and then maims in her own work!) in order to feel/deceive-readers-to-feel her work corrects it. But the precursor is the demiurge from the ephebe's perspective, both in the weaker sense of having marred the purity of what the ephebe should have been able to write by writing it first, and in the more classically culpable one of having passed on a vision they had maimed - either that of their own precursor or whatever rich world-given earliness we latecomers can't see for the noisy dead in the way. But the ephebe secretly knows her crime - the arc of the completed poetic career is a sort of confession. What does the precursor know, as precursor? (Loop to beginning above.)

(no subject)

Perhaps related:

Students hate being wrong, but they will accept being the least wrong in some group pre-designated as wrong (e.g. "students"). Getting them all to compete for that position is essential in a discussion-based class: any student feeling they're out of the running will take refuge in the excuse that they weren't trying - therefore will immediately stop trying so that this consoling theory is never disproved. So you praise what you can in any wrong answer (and you're always trying to ask them things they initially get mostly but not entirely wrong, so that you and they can take turns correcting it, thereby taking the class toward some goal while keeping it awake).

Actually, I'm not saying this is how one should teach, but it's how I'm trying to at the moment and how I've often seen it done. I have no clue if it works.

Students catching on to the fact that teaching proceeds this way come to realize that to not behave like the members of the group pre-designated as wrong behave is the best way to look right and take their place among the elect. One way to prove they're right is to answer questions without looking like they hate it when their answer is wrong - to answer often, and wrongly often, since that's what's being solicited. Looking happy that they're being set straight, happy that a truth is out there for them to find, happy to be tripping and flopping and spinning if each misstep is one more they will not make again and the treasure that much more assured. Note that it's just an appearance: they're still after an A or whatever. But get students to this point and they can learn a ridiculous amount, since leaping's the quickest way forward (and who of us has the guts to do it on our own, most days?). Thinking by leaps, in class or in papers, they'll get somewhere, and more importantly know that they got somewhere (a), can get somewhere (b), can get somewhere by leaping (c).

In my experience not even all graduate students, even those who themselves teach, are quite there. How do you reward the courage to be wrong in a way that can even compete with the natural high of being right, or at least more than offsets the natural low of being wrong?

It's a good thing you don't need to know how to teach to teach. For me, anyway.

(no subject)

And related to that:

The best way to teach is to not worry about how you might be teaching wrong in general, but to worry about each of the specific major ways you might be teaching wrong. It's probably the same with parenting: consciousness of the process as a process is doubtless an impediment, but various errors of those blissfully unconscious of what they're doing to their kids are much worse than those made by overly self-conscious parents. Categorical fear is panic, is dark pantheism, you against the whole world, can lead to premature surrenders or unnecessary wars. Subcategorical fears, some of them, are good sense.