On Jun 14, 2005, at 2:23 PM, Dorothy Stephens wrote:
> Hmmm. Willett, your student population appears to be radically
> different from mine. Most of our undergraduates don't know whether
> they want to go to graduate school--and most of us teaching them
> don't know whether they're qualified for graduate school--until
> they've had many chances to write original literary essays.
> Additionally, they need to read and write enough literary criticism
> as undergraduates to discover whether they, like you, loathe it or
> whether they find much of it exciting and thought-provoking even
> when they disagree with it. So putting students onto two tracks
> wouldn't work here in Arkansas. Nor would I want it to work; I
> like the interchanges of ideas in my classes between the Biology
> majors and the students who are interested in the possibility of
> graduate study in English. These interchanges sometimes generate
> ideas that knock my socks off.
I didn't mean to imply a two-track system, only a significant
reduction if not elimination of papers at the lower division courses
that are heavily populated by nonEnglish majors. Plagiarism is not
going away, it will simply respond to anti-plagiarism efforts with
ever greater ingenuity. Rather than investing so much time in
literary criticism essays, I would rather have students actually
learning and memorizing the knowledge they will need in later
careers. That knowledge needs to be ready at hand in the metal set,
where it can be accessed at once and at need, rather than outside as
it were in reference books. Testing not only helps internalize
facts, relationships, dates, maps, metrics, versification, texts and
skills, it gives students practice in extemporaneous and spontaneous
application, whether orally or verbally. Having recently returned
from Reuven Tsur's Text and Cognition Workshop at Tel Aviv
University, I was happy to see that a few other participants gave
their papers extemporaneously without reading. Most, of course,
simply droned away in a monotone, eyes stapled to the podium.
Anyone who can't give a 20-to-40-minute paper without reading has
already lost a great deal of mental power. On this score, the
Russians (as I said) are right. I remember Marina Tarlinskaja once
telling me that she never read a paper at any conference, no matter
how long or complex. The ability to speak extemporaneously is aided
by memorization, an art I require of all my students. Tom Cable,
whom some of the list may know, is a scholar who believes in
memorization as, no doubt, does Helen Vendler. Students who can
accurately cite whole passages of literary works in their tests and
then comment intelligently on them possess an invaluable, and highly
practical, talent that will stand them in good stead the rest of
their lives. The absolute importance of training the memory, which
no one in the ancient world ever doubted, needs a revival. Naturally
the importance of public speaking and debate encouraged that, not to
mention the papyrus roll, but we have veered to the far extreme and
condemned memorization as mere useless rote learning. Don't forget,
the ancients didn't make Zeus and Mnemosyne the parents of the Muses
for nothing.
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