Friday, March 7, 2014

Humanning Traffic: The Contra-Elite Gateway to the Mind

I bring a world and a mind into my classroom. The world, as Dylan Thomas, knew, was a realm of musical language and rhythmic power. My students grow prolific and write without fear.  By way of major authors or dissident styles, I lead them, through cognition, to hear the tone and sense of what they want to say in writing.

My students prosper after they flounder; they learn the stakes they have are the ones they create.  To write is to change ideas be it from something concrete to something abstract or from unfinished to finished, an idea is pliable and will yield to its expression.  These are not new practices.  "There's nothing new under the son," Schlovsky argues rightly.

The threat of writing to illicit, illegal, or corrosive power is a very profound fear power will always possess.  The overreaction to this fear is a peril to itself and by its imperiled crisis, becomes a form of mania.  Group mania has been both feared and fearsome. It can and does justify all forms of oppression. Even the terms of that oppression are forms of coercive oppression.

Mob indifference and academic mobbing are two different things.  The former is a sociological model for socializing behavior and the second is a pathology masked as proper courtesy.

For every victim of sexual assault and battery, there will be a justification in the act of itself, for the perpetrator to claim harm and injury.

Pity for the broken social contract will translate to pity for the perpetrator. There will be no sympathy for the victim.  It is her or his body that bears the marks of the assault and will be the same body now tarnished and defamed by the act.  The grieving or indifferent bystanders become champions of the status quo and advocates of the perpetration.

War, oppression, malice, envy, jealousy, destruction carry a message.  They carry this message through messengers.  At times it comes across as a micro-aggression, a joke, a mere oversight.  But these are its channels of communication.

Teaching writing can become a dangerous act against the messaging of social propriety as normative belonging and exchange of speech acts.

When I begin to teach I teach that "actions don't speak louder than words, and words are actions."

This defining change in writing breaks from the Contra-Elite Gateway to the Mind.


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