Today we talked about bull. Yes, bull as in b.s. Happily we confined our conversation exclusively to non-excrement oriented terms. I was very proud of all of you.We defined bull in a number of ways, but we focused mostly on how it is defined in academic terms. Bull, we said, is putting together a big song and dance around nothing much. In other words, the act of taking only a little information and making a huge essay out of it.
I asked the class members if they thought that bulling was a moral thing to do. Many of us said that it isn't. Which led us to wonder why. After all, if the teacher gives you a good grade for an essay constituted of pure bull, doesn't that mean the teacher values SOMETHING about it?
To help us answer our own question we wondered what the opposite of bull is. We decided that the opposite of bull is cow.
If cow is the opposite of bull then we decided that "cowing" must be having a lot of information but not doing much with it. Just sort of cramming it all into one space with no attempt at ... well, bull.
As we thought about it, we realized that it actually takes more thought to bull an essay than to cow it. A cow essay merely wants an avalanche of facts and information, which is easily copied and pasted from other sources. However, if we find ourselves having to write for a few pages on something we know little about, we grasp at straws, extrapolate from little, and otherwise work our poor little brains to the bone.
So writing bull actually demands more thought. Is this what school wants?
We looked at what school seems to want out of us, and mostly came to the conclusion that it wants cow. School seems mostly designed to fill us full of information (cow) in hopes that we will be able to spit it back up as whole as possible on tests and essays. However, we also noticed that whenever we are able to bull well, we tend to get really good grades. Why would teachers reward us for bull when they seem to want cow?
It's possible, we posited, that the trick is to use bull to convince the teacher that you are a cow.
Which brings us back to our original question. Is bull moral? It looks like it might be, after all, we think more when we bull our way through an essay than when we cow. So it's up to the teacher. Does the teacher want us to be cows, slurping up facts and regurgitating the cud on cue, or does the teacher want bulls who think?
(False dichotomy alert!)
For our assignment today I sent you all home with a brief essay to read. We'll discuss it tomorrow. You will either read the essay or not. If you don't read the essay, you need to bull me into believing that you did tomorrow. Those who can bull me (or who actually read the essay) will get points. Those who can't convince me will not get points.
Here is a link to the article, entitled "Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts."
