want to think about the liberal arts and the real world?

There is a panel I urge you to attend if you are interested in how the liberal arts mesh with the real world: the Crimmel Colloquium . I will be there--will you?

To get a taste of what the conversation might include, watch this video of Liz Coleman's speech at TED talks.

In Praise of Failure

There are so many parts of Sherwood's article that we read for this week that I find comforting. But this one part I find also intriguing:

Frankl implies that we can help writers cope with extreme fear of failure by asking them to do their best to fail. If this request inspires laughter at instead of confidence in us, so much the better.

I have a friend who sometimes assigns her writing students the task of writing the worst paper they possible can! It is a brilliant way to lower the stakes (as Peter Elbow points out is so important), to get people laughing and talking about writing.

We also have to think about our failures as writing consultants, and we have to talk about them, as much to give us the courage to keep trying as to learn from and improve upon.

Classmate Consultation Project

Many of you are now doing your consultations and some questions are coming up. I thought I would begin a conversation here about the assignment and offer some advice.

First, take some time to read the directions on Bboard and think about them. There are a lot of parts, and each has a specific purpose. If you have questions about a specific piece, please ask. You are planning to do a well thought out consultation, (written plan, commentary, rationale), doing the consultation (consultant report, writer response questions), and then reflecting on how the consultation went. I bet if you read the blog post that is linked there for reference in the assignment sheet, you will have lots of your questions answered.

In a way, the best thing that can happen to you is for something in the consultation to go not so great! It is up to you now to try to ask questions, get messy, and make mistakes. And as you do, I hope you will go back to the things you have read this semester and tear those apart too! THAT is what I am looking for in your rationale and your reflection papers in the Classmate Consultation Project.

on old ideas and learning

In class yesterday, I was mentioning the concept that in order to learn new things, you have to first understand how your current knowledge falls short, and how it might be misleading you. In this case, I think a picture is worth a thousand words.

Leo Lionni wrote a book called "Fish is Fish" (it makes a great present for nieces and nephews!) In the book, two fish were friends, only one wasn't a fish--he was a tadpole. In time, the tadpole grew legs and became a frog. He told his fish friend that he was going to go up on land to explore, but he would report back.

When the frog came back he told the fish about the interesting things he had seen, and he described them to the fish. Frog saw things with black and white spots and horns that ate grass, and this thing is called a cow. Here is what the fish saw in his mind's eye, based on that description:


and then he described people, walking around and wearing clothes:


We always build new knowledge on top of old knowledge. I think the most significant moment of learning is when we realize we were partly WRONG before, as well as partly right. SO you could say that the most important part of learning new things is the "Epic Fail." Before you can say "Ah HA!" you have to first say "Uh-oh..."
Can you think of a time when this happened for you?