--- Daniel Yocum wrote:
> Thanks, why no obligatory 'oohs' and 'aahs'?
It takes far more than *that* to excite me these days.
> The heart of a well healed clerk. Are your freshmen allowed to
> say something original (or from the heart out through the head),
> unquoted, cooked up in their own brain?
Well, now, that's the point, isn't it? But if one has a thought,
unquoted, "cooked up" as you say, one should be able to support it,
shouldn't one? Factually, anecdotally -- it really doesn't matter, just
as long as it's convincing to the reader.
Actually, one of my kids asked me the other day why I always wanted her to
come up with her own arguments. Why couldn't I just tell her what I
wanted to read? You see, Daniel, the problem in the average classroom
isn't stifling creativity, it's fostering it. We live in a nation of
Stepford children. And, the only way to avoid completing that cycle is to
force people to not only think, but understand *why* they think it. And
hopefully, they will be able to convince me, their reader, to think in a
new way. Otherwise, you've got a bunch of parrots repeating the same
tired arguments.
> And your post says?
I should think it was obvious.
> I am only an eng-gineer and we know what you think of them.
Ah, but some of my best friends are engineers.
> All English teachers think that of them. Not that it is untrue.
Can you back that up with statements from real, live English teachers?
Best,
Cecilia.
(By the way, before I was an English teacher, it wouldn't have been at all
unusual to find me with a multimeter in one hand, a deutsch connector in
the other, trying to figure out what was wrong with the machine in front
of me. I found, however, that I preferred kids to corporations.)
(Oh, and I'd also like to point out the supreme irony of the Subject line,
just in case anyone's missed it. It's the English teacher in me that's
able to spot these things.)
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Received on Wed Mar 5 22:22:20 2003
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