Round Language Love

I appreciated the sense of setting a scene for a heavy discussion in Plato’s Phaedrus. There is, a sense of empirical rationalism in teaching and learning about writing. I often think of the planes in which different aspects of these two shared experiences exist and in what realm of metaphysics and emotions each plane finds itself. When we teach about genre and experience with society we are also teaching aspects of boundaries and appropriateness but this is not done with a sense of restriction so much as structure for the sake of learning.

On page 6 Socrates says:

“Well, but are you and I expected to praise the sentiments of the author, or only the clearness, and roundness, and finish, and tournure of the language?”

I keep thinking of the word roundness in relationship to this description of love and language (as two separate endeavors) in relationship to students and their investment in learning. I think, as Phaedrus discusses, there is a separation between a sense of devotion that is long-term and that which is short-term and more passionate. We expect students to have both sides of learning but I wonder if there is a way to more concretely link these aspects of rhetoric and discussion of meaning to their work.

I catch myself sometimes thinking in terms of grades and boundaries in a sense that is unhealthy when I myself have started to lose focus of the overall goals in my classroom. I re-group, I think about ways to make lesson plans and assignments more meaningful. What ultimately ends up happening is a sense of honesty with my students, truth in the sense of the capital ‘T’.

This reminds me of what Socrates says on page 8:

“All good counsel begins in the same way; a man should know what he is advising about, or his cousel will all come to nought. But people imagine that they know about the nature of things, when they don’t know about them, and, not having come to an understanding at first because they think that they know, they end, as might be expected, in contradicting one another and themselves. “

And it reminds me of my second semester of teaching when one of my exhausted students looked up at me and said in all earnestness, “Why on earth are we writing about this?” The assignment at that moment was geared toward dissecting aspects of genres and conventions in different communities. I told the student that I would sleep on it and come up with an answer as big as the question.

That following Thursday I came into class with pictures of a Bison cave painting. I asked them what they thought the artist of this picture was trying to convey. The answers roughly included,

“A buffalo. A cow. A picture of what was outside his cave window. Something to eat.”

I pushed them further and made them think about the meaning of the picture. I made them think about the perspective of the caveman and the importance of the bison. Their answers developed into a general explanation of survival and protection: a foodsource, something to feed his family, keep them warm, bring the other cave people together over. Then I asked them what the difference was between the picture of the bison and what they were doing observing other communities. The entire tone of the classroom changed, a sense of love was built into the assignment through meaning and context. The language had become round.

You can imagine how rhetorically geeked I was to read The Evolution of Writing and discover a discussion of “creative explosions” through cultural context such as cave drawings. There was, from discussing the picture of the bison, a sense of connection through symbolism, of understanding how important a genuine sense of expression can become. I agree that “the expansion in cognitive ability is tied to the development of symbolic behavior.”

Our students have become symbolic creatures and even in an ‘objective’ delivery of information we sill impart symbolism to create a sense of roundness. This is something I continually think about in terms of classroom honesty and assignment development. More research to come on this…