Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Aristotle's Reply

As we talked about yesterday, Plato distrusted artists because they made imitations of imitations. However, he also distrusted poets (the main artists of his time). This was mainly because poets claimed that they were under the influence of “the muse" when they composed their works.



The muse was usually portrayed as a woman who brought inspiration to the artist. When the muse was doing her thing, the poets said that they were transported out of rationality, which led Plato to observe:

"... the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and then the mind is no longer in him.”

Being under the influence of the muse usually meant that the author wasn’t in the rational world, which really bugged Plato because above all, he revered rationality. In fact, most of his life was spent trying to convert his culture from founding its morality on stories about the gods to founding morality on abstract reason. One of the main reasons he did this was because Plato worried about what would happen if law-abiding people continually heard stories about people who were acting badly. He was afraid people would use those stories as an excuse to act badly themselves.

For example, Plato would probably condemn "The Odyssey" because, though Odysseus was a brave warrior, he was also sleeping around during his travels, despite the fact that his wife was going through a lot to keep the men away from her.

Thus, if poets can do anything good for society, it will be to tell stories that show people how to behave according to their social station and not rock the civic boat.



However Aristotle, one of Plato’s students, had a different idea. In his view, the poet wasn’t merely imitating the Forms. Nor was the poet telling people what had happened (like wars, political stuff, etc.). Rather the poets tell us what could be.

As Aristotle said, “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for poetry tends to express the universal; history, the particular.”

Thus, in Aristotle's view, poets were actually creating something closer to the Forms than mortal reality.

So what made for good poetry? Actually, it was tragedy that Aristotle focused on most. The purpose of a good tragedy, he said, was to bring the audience to a moment of catharsis.

Catharsis is a term in drama that refers to a sudden emotional breakdown or climax that constitutes overwhelming feelings of great sorrow, pity, laughter or any extreme change in emotion that results in the restoration, renewal and revitalization for living. In other words, a purgation.

Aristotle judged the worth of art on how well it could initiate catharsis in its audience.

We watched two short films (The Competition and More - both of which you can watch by clicking on the titles) to see which stimulated greater catharsis in us.



The Competition was essentially made up of face shots of people sitting on a windy hillside. This went on for about three minutes until we found out that they were in a crying contest and had to drop three tears on their paper to win.



More was a stop motion animation about an alien-looking person who creates a pair of glasses that makes the world look colorful and happy. However, at the end of the film, despite his success, he is not happy.

The votes fell overwhelmingly to More. The main reason it produced more catharsis in us, we said, was because there were significant changes in the character and his circumstances throughout the film. He started sad, became happy, but then went back to sadness.

Aristotle would agree with this assessment. Seeing a character go through change is a great way to induce catharsis in an audience.

The Competition stayed at essentially the same level the entire film. Though the people were ostensibly sad (a good prerequisite for tragedy), we saw no change and therefore felt no catharsis. We did, however, enjoy the twist at the end.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Plato's Aesthetic Philosophy

When you critique a work or art, whether it be a painting, some music, or a passage of writing, you must have criteria on which to base your critique.

We started our exploration of criteria by learning how Plato (a philosopher born in Greece around 423 B.C.E.) formulated his criteria for what makes good or bad art.

Plato had a worldview that he described by using the metaphor of a cave.

We are like people who have been strapped to chairs, unable to move. We are sitting inside a cave staring at the back wall. On the back wall we we see shadows, which we think are reality.



If we could free ourselves we would see that the shadows are actually cast by two-dimensional cutouts, and we would perceive these shapes as being reality and the shadows as only imitations. However, if we found our way of the cave, we would find the cutouts were themselves only imitations of real, three dimensional objects. We would find out that there are real tables, chairs, and cats, and that the shadows we had once thought were reality were actually only shadows of imitations.

It's kind of like in the "Holiday In Vince" episode of Rex the Runt when Rex, Wendy, and Bad Bob get into Vince's brain through his ear. Once there, they find Vince and get into his brain through his ear. At the end of the episode, Rex, Wendy and Bad Bob think they've returned to the real world, but are in fact, still inside Vince's brain. Therefore, everything they perceive has been filtered from outside reality through Vince's abnormal brain.

Plato believed that outside the realm of our perception (or outside Vince's head) there is, in actuality, a reality that our earth is only an imitation of, like the cutouts. Outside our perception exist the ideals of objects and living things which Plato called "Forms." They are the perfect, ideal abstractions that our earth and everything we perceive on it, are only imitations of. Therefore, art is the shadows of the cutouts. So Plato wasn't too impressed with artists or poets. After all, they only made imitations of imitations.

To show why Plato may have believed in the world of the Forms, we talked about chairs.


We agreed that this was a chair. We defined a chair as having four legs, a place for your rear, and a back.


So is this a chair? It only has three legs. We decided it was a chair anyway and expanded our definition of chair to include three legs.


But what about this one? It has 10 legs. Still, everyone was willing to call this a chair because it met our criteria of having a place for your bum and a back. So we expanded our definition again to include ten legs.


But what about this one? Suddenly we have a chair with no feet. We're we still willing to call it a chair? Most of us were. After all, someone was sitting in it. Thus, we expanded our definition of chair yet further. It could now have between zero and ten legs.

This piece of furniture has a place to rest your bum. We're OK with it having no legs, but, it has no back. However, many of us were still willing to call it chair, thus expanding our definition yet again so that now a chair can have between zero and ten legs and have no back.


Therefore, this is a chair. It has a place for your bum, four legs and no back. The class usually protested calling this a chair. They claimed it was a television.


So I gave up and presented you with this chair. It has between zero and ten legs, a place for your bum and a back.

Plato leads us down this infuriating road to prove a point. When we talk about a chair, we're not talking about an actual object so much as chair-ness. When we define something as a chair, we're talking about how it fits on a scale of chair-like attributes. So the first picture of a chair would score high on the chair-ness scale, while the "television" and the contortionist would score lower on the scale, though they still have attributes of a chair.

The reason we recognize chair-like qualities in all these things is because, out there in the land of Forms, floats the abstract idealization of a chair which is embedded in our minds as a kind of memory. So when we see something chairish, we can discern its chair-like qualities.

So, according to Plato, we are all metaphorically strapped to chairs watching the shadow play on the wall. We do not know that the shadows are two steps removed from reality. But when we see something that stimulates our memory of a Form strongly, we call that good art.

Good art, therefore, is that shadow which most closely resembles the Form outside the cave.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Have You Seen This Man?

Today we watched a film called "Have You Seen This Man?"

It was about an artist named Geoff Lupo who goes around New York City hanging up hand-drawn fliers that offer to sell mundane items like a cracker or a thumbtack for 15 cents.




The film showed people actually calling him and buying the stuff. It even showed and art collector who had started to collect Lupo's work and resell it on the streets, becoming a kind of itinerant museum curator.

Most of us weren't sure what to think about Lupo's work, because it seemed that people weren't so interested in collecting his fliers as they were actually going through the process of buying the items. This weirded us out because we are used to thinking of art as something drawn or painted that we hang up in an art gallery or in our home.

Though Lupo's drawings were good, it wasn't the drawings themselves that seemed to attract people. Rather it was the mystery and the novelty of the situation he had set up with the fliers. Lupo had created an interesting story that people wanted to enter, even though they knew it was absurd.

We decided that Lupo's art wasn't so much drawing as it was dramaturgy (the theory and practice of drama). In a way, Lupo was a performance artist who invited people through his fliers to be in a small, unscripted play with him.

So it was the idea behind the artwork that intrigued people.

Most of us decided that Lupo's artwork could be described as good art if we judged it on its ability to get people to participate in his little plays. Others of us held that Lupo was simply a nut.

Good Art / Bad Art

Today we discussed what makes for good or bad art.

At the beginning of class I put up a painting by Franz Klein and asked if it was art. Opinion was divided on the question.



Those who thought it was art reasoned that it's an interesting piece that invites different interpretations. Others thought it used shapes and contrast in interesting ways. A few said that the novelty of the piece was intriguing. Others said that, even thought they didn't like the painting, they were willing to call it art, simply because anything painted by a person could be seen as being art.

In other words, they give credence to the idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Those who thought it wasn't art reasoned that it looked as if it hadn't taken much time at all to make, and that art required time. It also seemed lacking in detail and craft.

Next I put up Michaelangelo's painting of Plato and Aristotle and asked if it was better art than Klein's piece.



Most of the class felt it was because it represented reality better, obviously took a lot of time, and showed great craftsmanship. We created a spectrum of art that ranged from "snore" on the bottom to "changed my life forever" at the top. Most students put Michaelangelo much higher up on the spectrum than they put Klein.

So, though most students were unwilling to say one painting or the other was not art, they were willing to put different art pieces on a spectrum. Which means that we must have some criteria for what differentiates better art from worse art. And this idea goes against the idea that beauty is completely in the eye of the beholder.

In the coming term we're going to be exploring what we can do to find our criteria for judging literature and establish it reasonably.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Ch -ch-ch-ch-changes


Today we talked about times when we feel like we actually learned something in an English class. The results of the discussion were quite illuminating.

We found that most students remembered learning something when in a 1 on 1 situation with a teacher. We also found that putting things to songs was helpful for memorization (Who wants to compose the logos, ethos, pathos song for us?), that practice was often helpful, and that using symbols, such as the ones in Framing Your Thoughts can help solidify concepts.

For the rest of the class we talked about an essay written by some students that critiqued my teaching methods.

We could tell that the authors were angry with me, but that they had done a good job keeping their ethos level-headed, which was much to their credit. We also noted that they did some research (for example, talking with Juniors and Seniors about what they had encountered in Sophomore English).

We gathered from reading their concerns that, in order to accommodate the authors better we should implement a little more discipline into the classroom, review basic concepts from time to time and make sure our work would prepare us well to enter Junior English next year.

I'm grateful that these students took the time to make their concerns known to me and hope the class becomes a more inclusive place for them.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Mind Metaphors

Today we talked about metaphors for the mind and what they might mean to a teacher and a student.

The mind is a muscle to be exercised:



We interpreted this metaphor to mean that when the mind is exercised on a particular function repetitively, it becomes stronger (i.e. more able to perform that function with less effort). This is the reason, we thought, why math teachers have us do so many repetitions of mathematical exercises.

The mind is a cavern to be illuminated:



One way we interpreted this metaphor was that there is possibly much already in the mind, and that our job is to discover what is already in there. Plato, in fact, thought this was true. All learning, to him, was remembrance.

A teacher who teaches by the cavern metaphor might be the kind who "gives us a light" or an opportunity to explore the reaches of our minds.

The mind is a cup to be filled.



This metaphor made us imagine that our mind can be filled with information from an outside source. as a pitcher fills a cup. However, this metaphor also suggests that the mind can be completely filled until there is no room left

The cup metaphor also made us wonder why information leaves our brains. Does it evaporate? Are our cups actually sieves? Also, what happens when a teacher dispenses information and we don't receive it? Is it the teacher's fault (being the pitcher) or the student's (being the cup)?

We decided that a teacher who worked by the cup method would tend to lecture a lot or insist that a student receive all his/her learning from a book.

The mind is a garden to be cultivated.



In order for a garden to grow, we said, many elements must combine: sunlight, water, air, seeds, soil, rain, etc. We thought that this could represent the variety of subjects and approaches we need in order to create a proper learning environment.

However, a garden doesn't tend itself. It needs a caretaker actively cultivating the garden. We decided that this cultivator isn't the teacher, it's the student. The teacher can bring seeds, fertilizer, etc. to the garden gates, but the student must do the work to make them grown.

We noted that the garden type teacher might be the kind that uses all of the mind metaphors: providing opportunities (the light in the cavern), information (pouring water into the cup), and exercise.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Writing Your Presentation

I've been talking about your projects with Superintendent Hillstead, and he in turn has been talking with the school board. They are all interested in reading what you have written up, so I am putting together a packet of your material for them.

The board has requested that we take 10-15 minutes to present our findings to to them this Wednesday. They are planning to make a decision on the 4.5 day week issue next month, so now is the perfect time to make our influence known.



As Shakespeare puts it: "Brevity is the soul of wit." What he means is that the shorter and more cogent you can make your presentation, the better. Thus, we will be condensing our papers to their very essence. Three sentences to be exact. You will present these sentences orally to the school board during their Wednesday meeting.

I have three structures that you may use if you're feeling at a loss.

Structure 1: Straight Argument

1. Use the first sentence to make your thesis clear. For example: "We should institute the 4.5 day school week because students from Mountain View will start coming here."

2. Use the second sentence to provide evidence supporting your thesis. For example: "In a survey I conducted, 80 percent of Mountain View students surveyed said they would prefer the 4.5-day school week over a block schedule."

3. Use the third sentence to sweeten the deal. For example: "As you all know, the more students we have, the more money the school district receives."

Structure 2: Problem/Solution

1. Use the first sentence to describe a problem. For example: "For the past few years, more students have transfered out of Lyman into Mountain View than the other way around causing Lyman's school district to lose money."

2. Use the second sentence to set up evidence that will lead to a solution. For example: "In a survey I conducted, 80 percent of Mountain View students surveyed said they would prefer the 4.5-day school week over a block schedule."

3. Use the third sentence to propose the solution and its benefits. "From this survey, we can see that instituting the 4.5-day school week is likely to attract more students to the district, thus increasing the district's financial resources."

Structure 3: Analogy

1. Use the first sentence to set up your analogy. For example: "Instituting the 4.5-day school week would be like winning the lottery, all kinds of money will come into the district."

2. Use the second sentence to set up your evidence. For example: "A survey I conducted showed that, of the Mountain View students surveyed, 80 percent preferred the 4.5-day week over the block schedule."

3. Use the third sentence to bring the analogy and evidence together. For example: "It's likely that students will start moving into the Lyman school district for the 4.5-day school week, and as we all know, the more students we have, the more money the district receives."

This assignment should be finished by the end of class. When you feel you are finished, call me over to look at it. When I approve it, please email it to me.


The school board meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday at 8 p.m. in the basement of the District Office.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Putting it all together

We've done a number of exercises to get you ready to write your essay.
  1. We've put together a proposal argument in all three forms
  2. We've gathered some sources and
  3. We've patched together a mini essay.
Now we need to put it all together.

Here's an easy way to do it.

1. Start with the categorical proposal argument. For example:

"The 4.5 day school will be good for Lyman High School and the district because it will save wear and tear on the carpets and reduce the chances of accidents and of the school being sued."

2. Describe the problem the 4.5 day week will solve and back up your assertions with evidence. For example:

"Right now there is a problem in Lyman High School. The carpets are wearing away faster than we are able to replace them [list examples of places in the school where wear and tear is especially bad]. Here is what the carpet looks like in the Social Studies wing of the building.



This lack of maintenance is leading to ugly halls and tripping hazards. [list some occasions where an accident was narrowly averted, or actually happened]. If Lyman High School is to avoid getting sued for negligence, it will need to take action. [list some case examples of when schools were sued for neglecting their physical facilities]."


3. Present the solution to the problem using a causal proposal argument. For example:

"A 4.5 day week will lead to a significant reduction in the wear and tear on the carpets, which will lead to a reduction in the chance of hallway accidents and thus reduce the chance of the school getting sued for negligence."

4. Present evidence to back up your claim. For example:

According to an article in the Nosehair Gazette the Nosehair High School reduced their carpet wear and tear by 50 percent by going to a 4.5 day week (citation here). A study done by Dr. Horace Q. McSpankenplatter showed that, statistically, the shorter the school week, the less the chance of the school being sued (citation here).

5. Conclude with a resemblance argument to get your point across with a poetic twist. For example:

"Instituting the 4.5 day week in Lyman High School is like maintaining your car. Sure, it costs a little in the short run, but your car will last much longer and you'll probably never get stuck in the middle of nowhere with a blown tire or a smoking engine. Isn't the fiscal stability and the safety of the students worth it?"

If you've been keeping up on the assignments thus far, you should already have a good start on this paper. As always, I am happy to help you.