What’s your favorite logic textbook?

I have always wanted to challenge myself to teach logic or symbolic logic.  Every opportunity I have had to teach logic never really came to be, lack of enrollment, registrar forgetting to put the course on the schedule, but I am now in a situation that I might be teaching it in the coming year where I will likely have enrollment and the course will actually happen.  I know this will take some disciplined preparation on my part, and I am up for the task, but I am struggling at this point to arrive at a compelling text.

Do any of you have experience teaching logic, and what text or texts do you use?

What I’m teaching in the fall

I’ve received my teaching assignment for the fall. I’ll be doing the elective over Being and Time that I’ve discussed periodically over the last year (my first Shimer elective), and I’ll also be doing two sections of Humanities 1: Art and Music (basically intro to fine arts). This will “complete the set” for me in terms of Shimer’s Humanities curriculum (including working on a comprehensive exam), so that’s nice. I’m also excited because a couple of my colleagues have significantly reformulated the course to center it around Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which has provided fodder for many works of music and art and also includes significant reflection on the arts more generally. More broadly, I’m relieved that after three semesters in a row teaching “writing intensive” courses, I have been spared this fall.

What about you, my dear readers? What are your future teaching plans?

My radical pedagogical program

First, you need to read good books. To get the most out of those books, you need to talk about them with other people who are also trying to work their way through them. In addition, you need to write about them in a disciplined and focused way. Both of these tasks require supervision and guidance by more experienced learners — preferably those who have already gone through an educational program that takes both discussion and written analysis to the highest level.

Second, for some types of skills — such as language acquisition, mathematical manipulation, and technical lab skills — there’s no way around requiring carefully targetted and supervised exercises. Preferably, these exercises would be developed and overseen by someone with a high degree of technical proficiency and experience in the field in question, as such a person would have the best view of which skills were most valuable.

Finally, for command of facts, limited use of rote memorization can provide a baseline, but the main focus should be on learning how best to search for information and assess the trustworthiness of the sources found. All of this is best done in close dialogue with someone who has a lot of experience with research.

I believe that the pedagogical research would bear all this out, and my own experience at an institution that embraces this model shows me that it works.

Starting from these premises, certain natural consequences inevitably present themselves.

My grading lexicon

Over the years, I’ve developed a kind of personal jargon for grading papers. They are little metaphors or turns of phrase that I use in an attempt to get at common failings of student writing in an economical and somewhat humorous way — not to make fun of them, but hopefully to get their attention more effectively. Here are three of the main ones:

• Paper in search of a thesis — this describes a paper that starts with a vague or tautologous thesis (e.g., “the authors are similar in some ways, but there are also important differences”) and only comes to a more concrete position in the conclusion, after working through the material. While an inductive approach has its virtues, it seems to me that this type of paper is a second-to-last draft handed in as a final draft — once they’ve found their thesis, they need to put it at the beginning and then focus their exposition on it.
• The silo effect — this is a typical feature of a “paper in search of a thesis.” It describes a tendency in comparison-contrast papers for students to summarize one topic, then summarize the other, without any immediately apparent connection between the two (e.g., each exposition has a parallel structure, each refers to the other).
• The “and another thing!” style of organization — papers suffering from this affliction have no real flow or overall organizational scheme, abruptly moving from one topic to the next. Often the word “another” will literally be present in most or all of their transitions. While it can’t always be avoided, a transition that can do no better than “another” in order to make a connection is basically an open seam.

How about you, dear readers? Do you have any similar shorthand phrases for common pitfalls?

The pedagogical problem of “usage”

It’s rare for a native speaker of English to write a sentence that is truly ungrammatical. The errors that most writers face are at the level of syntax and, especially, usage. Where do we put commas? How do we integrate quotations into our sentences? How do we maintain parallelism in lists? Those kinds of issues are unimportant from the perspective of the ideas expressed, though they can reach a point where meaning is obscured. They are important, however, to the reception of a writer’s work, to how seriously it is taken. Fair or not, a pattern of haphazard deviations from standard written English undermines a writer’s credibility — and so teaching students how to overcome those problems is very important.

I must admit, though, that I’m not quite sure how. In fact, sometimes I despair that if a person has not picked up an eye for such details by a certain point in their life, it’s just not a fixable problem. I can spot-check and explain things if students seem to have one or two recurring problems (which is already a privilege, since my class sizes are very small), but if they have more comprehensive difficulties, what does one do? I’ve written before that one can’t have real conscious control over comma usage without understanding the grammatical structure of one’s own sentences, a rule that I would extend to most if not all syntax and usage issues — but sitting them down with a grammar book hardly seems to be the answer.

As I reflect on my own experience, it seems that the point where I really began to understand English grammar was when I began learning Spanish in high school. I’ve heard similar stories from others, and it makes sense: you’re forced to think about grammar because you can’t fall back on your native proficiency. Perhaps this is a good reason to include a foreign-language requirement in high school and college — not to learn to speak the language (which is almost impossible to achieve through classroom instruction alone), but to learn about language “as such,” to gain the distance necessary for reasoned reflection on grammar.

Yet that seems unsatisfactory for a lot of obvious reasons. I’m hardly going to tell the student who has more comprehensive usage problems to go learn French and get back to me. What do others think?

“Think, pig!”: The University Discourse and the Ignorant Schoolmaster

I recently taught Waiting for Godot and was struck by Lucky’s speech in the first act, which is prompted by Pozzo’s imperious demand: “Think, pig!” The speech is of course a garbled series of academic throat-clearings. Previously I had found this merely amusing, but in the wake of reading Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster and Lacan’s Seminar XVII, it seemed different this time around. I joked on Twitter that we should exclaim, “Think, pig!” whenever there’s a lull in class discussion, but I started to wonder if that’s finally all we’re doing as educators.

Plato or Aristotle: Who’s better?

Since the New Year, I’ve been reading some hardcore Plato and Aristotle, working my way through the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics (in progress), and the Politics (still to come) as part of my class prep. In general, Shimer has led to a major uptick in my consumption of both authors, and in the case of Aristotle it has amounted to a massive crash-course in things that I “should’ve read” long ago.

It seems to me that Aristotle is more authentically dialogical in his approach than Plato, despite the format of their extant works. Perhaps it’s the difference between exposing ignorance (Plato) and looking for the “grain of truth” in all the received opinions (Aristotle). The result is a different kind of tedium characteristic of both authors — it can be hard to summon up the will power to follow yet another thorough consideration of various fine distinctions (Aristotle), but my eyes just glaze over through the repeated “Of course, Socrates!” sections in Plato.

At the same time, experience shows me that Plato’s dialogues are much better for generating in-class discussion than Aristotle’s texts, so what do I know?

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann…

A colleague of mine once said that among white students, discussions of race tend toward silence, while discussions of gender tend toward anger. This sounds right to me, and certainly these reactions are not limited to white students. It seems to me that both phenomena share a common root: discomfort with any kind of generalization.

Memorization

I’m finally getting around to reading Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, and I’m finding it really exciting and helpful. Of particular interest is his emphasis on memorization as a form of intellectual emancipation. Thinking ahead to my Heidegger class for next year, it occurs to me that if I could get every student to memorize one important paragraph from Being and Time, they could conceivably wind up being ahead of a student who passed an exam on the best-ever lecture course in terms of actually understanding how to read Heidegger.

My colleague Aron Dunlap has suggested incorporating a memorization component into our literature class next semester, and while I was open to the idea before, now I’m positively intrigued. Have any of you incorporated memorization into your teaching, specifically of poetry? What were your experiences?

An odd demand

When discussing the Communist Manifesto in class, both my students and I were puzzled by the ninth item on the list of demands: “Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.” It became less clear as it went on — the combination of agriculture with manufacturing makes sense (presumably to increase food production), but why is a more equable distribution of population such a priority that it belongs on this list of ten basic demands? (I apologize if I’m missing something obvious.)