Derrida's article I was talking of :

This article by Derrida is one hell of a piece of writing. It transcends its meaning, hence there's a huge x over it. It's definitely crossed over/out. A perfect example of theory and practice becoming inseparable like content and form in modernist times.

"For the god of writing is also the god of death. He will punish the imprudent who, in their quest for unlimited knowledge, end up drinking the dissolved book.…To drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one's own…" Jean-Marie Benoist, The Geometry of the Metaphysical Poets .

Derrida.

To have a friend: to keep him. To follow him with your eyes. Still to see him when he is no longer there and to try to know, listen to, or read him when you know that you will see him no longer—and that is to cry. To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die. One of us, each says to himself, the day will come when one of the two of us will see himself no longer seeing the other and so will carry the other within him a while longer, his eyes following without seeing, the world suspended by some unique tear, each time unique, through which everything from then on, through which the world itself—and this day will come—will come to be reflected quivering, reflecting disappearance itself: the world, the whole world, the world itself, for death takes from us not only some particular life within the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up in a both finite and infinite—mortally infinite—way. That is the blurred and transparent testimony borne by this tear, this small, infinitely small, tear, which the mourning of friends passes through and endures even before death, and always singularly so, always irreplaceably. Jean-Marie Benoist, with whom I shared, among so many other things, a veneration for John Donne, will have spoken so well of what he called, twenty years ago, “the geometry of the metaphysical poets,” and of this tear of the world, of world, this world-tear in A Valediction: Of Weeping: A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heavens dissolveéd so. Then there comes a time, in the course of a generation, the gravity of which becomes for some, myself among them today, more and more palpable, when you reach an age, if you will, where more and more friends leave you, oftentimes younger than you, sometimes as young as a son or daughter. My admiration, as well as my affection, for Jean-Marie has in fact resembled, for close to a quarter of a century now, that of an older brother who finds himself astonished, and more and more so, though always in a somewhat tender way, by the audacity of thought, the growing force, the justified self-confidence of someone whom he first knew, precisely, with the still tender traits of a very young thinker, but one already sharp, rigorous, ironic, iconoclastic, unsubmissive, covetous above all else of his freedom, his audacity, and his daring. During our first encounters at the Ecole Normale in 1964, I remember having felt some perplexity, along with a sort of irritated concern. But a certain complicity brought us closer together very quickly through our work and our reading, a joyful and confident complicity to which I owe a great deal: it reassured me at a time when I needed it, and it was to do so for years with a constancy for which I will always be grateful, the sort of warm fidelity without which things have little meaning. I like to say “complicity” because often, in the beginning, between 1968 and 1975, a deep agreement (I mean in our philosophical thought and interests) sometimes took on the air of an alliance in a symbolical conspiracy in the midst of the culture of the time. And I liked a lot, indeed I never stopped liking, the mischievous eye, the devilish grin in the middle of that somewhat childlike face, the sometimes biting irony, the polemical verve of Jean-Marie. I will not speak here of his work, or, I should also say, of his action, of all that is most readily accessible, public, and known: always intelligent and courageous, this work in action was a constant engagement with the philosophical, political, and religious debates of the times. A provocative engagement, sometimes ahead of the times, the conviction of an enlightened avant-gardist, of someone sent out ahead to enlighten us—and I mean this in the sense of the Enlightenment and of his dear Montesquieu. (It was particularly that beacon entitled Marx est mort—in 1970!—that, in spite of my agreement with the essence of the “theses,” an agreement that he invoked in advance, caused me to have some reservations, which I still have today—why conceal it?—concerning the effects sought after, the strategy, the connotations, or, so to speak, the “pragmatics” of the judgment, and these reservations, to which he was sensitive and which he judged, I think, with some severity, had silently begun to separate us, though even when they became more pronounced they never compromised the friendship I have mentioned.) He had an acute sense of the tremors that transform the landscape of history and the ground of thought. (I am thinking here of his very first articles, which announced an entire trajectory, “Towards an International Social Contract,” and “Marcuse, an Aufklärer against Enlightenment,” and then of the two beautiful books that followed in 1975, Tyrannie du logos and The Structural Revolution, which we must read again and again; you will notice, as I have, how well they have held up over time, resisting the various fashions of the day.) I wish instead to turn today to the “golden years,” those I quietly lament and that are less visibly public: the numerous visits in London at the French Institute or in Oxford when I would come for lectures, the wonderful hospitality of Jean-Marie and Nathalie, everything that happens between friends around an ambassador of culture who is open, intelligent, joyous, inventive, incisive (Jean-Marie Benoist was exemplary in these ways as well), the meetings, the discussions, the “parties,” the nighttime jaunts through the city. I am presently rereading all the letters from that period, and there are many of them (several spoke of his work in progress, of great books promised on The proper of man and the English metaphysical poets—promised and given through other books and under other titles), and since that time I've always kept on one of my shelves a strange and precious object, something more than precious, in truth, a priceless sign signed by his hand (his large and beautiful black handwriting, high, angular, quick, at once impatient and perfect): a white box on the bottom of which is written “This is not a pipe,” and then, right below, the word “is” under erasure with an x through it: “this is a pipe.” One day (and this is part of a long story) I had confided to Jean-Marie what a certain gift meant to me, a square pipe given to me by my father shortly before his death. This pipe, which stood upright on its bowl when I put it down on the table to write, had been lost many times, found again, broken, repaired—and one day forgotten in London, in the Benoists' living room. Having repatriated it after receiving my telegram, Jean-Marie himself in turn forgot to bring it when he came to visit me on the rue d'Ulm, so he then sent it to me through the mail, recalling, at the bottom of the box, that no, really, between us, and how right he was, this given thing, though it was also one, would not have been a pipe. I can feel that by writing with a certain tone, and by privileging some memories rather than others, I am letting myself be invaded tonight, at this hour, by English signs: English because I was so happy during our meetings in London (probably more than in Paris, which I blame in the end—blaming myself first of all, of course—when I think that it was things still much too “Parisian,” that is, too provincial, what might appear to be ideologico-political divisions but are, in fact, little more than petty infighting, things that did not concern us, that should not have concerned either him or me, parochial tempests, that ended up “clouding” our relationship; I blame myself for this more than ever today, and for having taken these things much more seriously than they deserved to be, as if death were not keeping watch, as if we were not supposed to see it coming; but I always knew—and I blame myself today for not having told him this—that these clouds left intact in me what they seemed to conceal of my friendship; and even when we had, as we say, lost sight of one another, I remained fascinated at a distance by the grand gestures of this hell of a man, even if I sometimes mumbled to myself); English too because I felt how much England had marked his thinking, about politics in particular; English, finally, because of certain literary passions, as I have said, that I shared with him, and that probably went beyond literature, toward what he called, once again in The Geometry of the Metaphysical Poets, “proper names in shreds,” or “the discourse on shadows,” and, particularly, “anamorphosis and the tear.” Yes, we must read and reread what Jean-Marie Benoist has left us. I will do so again, but for the moment, between confiding and thinking, which are never totally foreign to one another, I am trying to discern what he will have let us glimpse about tears: through tears. He does not teach us that we must not cry; he reminds us that we must not taste a tear: “The act of tasting the tear is a desire to reannex the other”; one must not “drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one's own.” Therefore: not to cry over oneself. (But does one ever do this? Does one ever do anything but this? That is the question that quivers in every tear, deploration or imploration itself.) One should not develop a taste for mourning, and yet mourn we must. We must, but we must not like it—mourning, that is, mourning itself, if such a thing exists: not to like or love through one's own tear but only through the other, and every tear is from the other, the friend, the living, as long as we ourselves are living, reminding us, in holding life, to hold on to it.

He came to this kind of writing after an ardous search which went through the complexity of "Of Grammatology/ie(?)". Some may find even this kind of writing too complex because the sentences are too long. It is impossible to inscribe complexity , as far as I know, in simple subject- verb-object sentences.

Why for me Derrida the writer is under a sign of erasure

You have to read his article on Benoist to get it.

The essay's last part/ Title : A tesseract on the democratization of the teaching of English language and literature in India

The realist position.

I teach a syllabus with prescribed textbooks; and a written exam the students have to take, at the end of the year, by which their "performance" will be assessed. At the parent-teacher conferences and some of the staff meetings and through feedback I have received from some of the more voluble students I have come to realise that for most parents, for the majority of (Western/national) universities and for ninety-nine percent of the students what "really" matters is grades. There is also a "vast" syllabus to "finish off" with only limited time to do it in. Added to these issues is the cumbersome paperwork connected to the Western idea of documentation which has its plus and minus points, if looked at objectively. These are the constraints that I work in. I can also call them factors securing/offering security to the students, teachers, parents and school managements. Structure is, after all, necessary. However, the studies done on this kind of a partially closed system leads to conclusions like the ones drawn by Anita Rampal , the remedies suggested always including the same objective of freeing children from the very strictures that it seems impossible to get rid of. As for the children themselves, while the constraints irk them they also impart a certain sense of safety to them because of their strongly felt need for a "clear" structure.Can constructivism provide the balance? One would have to give a double-edged answer, i.e; yes and no. Two schools of thought - one, that believes in subverting the system gradually and the other that thinks of just getting rid of it lock, stock and barrel and ushering in the new in a revolutionay coup d'etat are both theories that yield mixed results in actual application. Facilitators who have moved through the three positions - I mean, including the traditionalist one (i.e; keep things as they are and make them function to peak levels in efficiency-) will understand what the present writer means. Another school opines "give the students what they want".

The absence of a cut and dried solution is our strength. As long as reflection and review goes on of the entire pedagogical process and things are in a flux there will be a vibrancy to our attempts to better quality education . It will ensure that we see ourselves as learners first and foremost rather than as all-knowing eduactors , keeping us on our toes.

Solutions that raise more questions than answers.

When we think of major educators and thinkers India has had in the recent past like Gandhi with his metaphor of the gardener and the plant, Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and J. Krishnamurti and of the democratization of education , an issue that was felt to be of the utmost importance by all the above mentioned giants - and we also think of the topic at the personalised level of one's own professional practice ; it seems obvious that one has to work on two fronts. One front has to be broad, group activity that would include revamping the curriculum and the syllabus including the textbooks.
The other front would be narrow , considering how to apply these things at the miniscule levels of giving attention to individual students and the groups that we call a 'class' at present.

As far as English - an international link language that is also the language of technology and one of the nation's own languages- is concerned its democratization in the overall curriculum has to include ceratin new drives in framing the curriculum. I shall concern myself more with the syllabus.
Suggestions could be listed thus: a) the students should be consulted as to what they think their needs are and then the drafts can go into the written form.
b) The syllabus must offer the freedom to the teacher to teach in more than one language if it fetches results. This applies especially to ESL . This would be an option and not a must.
c) The rewriting of textbooks that such a directive would result in must be rigorously tested for quality and their abilty to interest ALL the learners.
d) Where literature is concerned the choice of texts must include an international work of repute - in translation -, a work from Britain in English, a work from Indian literature and a local/regioanl work - both again in translation, if need be.)
e) Another option would be choosing short pieces making the coursework light on the students but taking into consideration different genres and forms and including different ideologies and cultures. A syllabus like this would teach a short story, an essay , a drama - preferably, a short one-act play, a novel(a novellette would do just as well) , an essay (personal or dealing with critical theory, theory or criticism) to be taught over a period of two years. The learning objectives would be limited to thinking, speaking, presenting, listening, writing and reading by whichiI mean literary and semantic appreciation.
f.Asessment would be entirely revamped. While grades and marks would need to be retained for the sake of the "system" the emphasis would be on thinking skills, creativity, innovativeness, effort , presenting, listening and writing skills collectively. Critical analysis would be as important as producing creative output with both being wighted equally.
g. The output of another of the language-oriented papers beisdes teaching language and literature w/ should be aimed towards vocational use somewhere down the line so that teaching skills like writing CV's etc, i.e; introducing subjects like fucntional, communicative English would be a plus. This would take skills like translation, medical,legal and other kinds of transcription, technical writing,business English, creative writing, televisual presentation, news readers, copy writing, script writing, reporting for journalisms -radio,TV, film, print,web - editing, making publisher's choices, criticism, reviewing, research and scholarship and other job oriented vectors of language use into consideration

This list could go on but space doesn't permit it.

Practical application.

The real challenge for the facilitator is in the "class". It is possible to come to an assessment of a student which is accurate and easy to help him/her in such a way that s/he doesn't slip back
but true democratization would include the satisfying result that the student/each student actually improves in his skills over the period of time that he/she works with you. This is the real challenge. He should not go away feeling that he was taught well but , more important, there should be a clear difference brought about in his ability to learn and do. His potential to be a 'mover' must be tapped and maximised. This is an area fraught with possibilities and I feel the answer lies in allowing contemporaneity - i.e. working with what the student knows and is interested in, and the latest advances of technology adapted inovatively to meet the present situation to mesh with the latest teaching techniques is the way forward. This, along with the radicalization that could be brought in by ensuring greater student participation in "all " the activities the teacher considers his forte at present, is a possible solution.

Concretely speaking, what this means is discussing with students the choice of textbooks, self-assessment and peer group evaluations, sharing of lesson objectives and everything else with students who would be interested in knowing of the documentation process of the teacher, self-and group-teaching by the students and adapting the possibilities of technology in an innovative way to situational and contemporaneous needs of learning. The tech must be simple, low cost and environment friendly. Alternates should be kept readily be available, in case of one method not working, in the same way the teacher goes into a class with two or three options at least.

Examples: In my class while teaching poetry I took some students over to the computer lab and showed them a few hypertext poems and hypertext fictions and this set them thinking about the difference in the forms of poetry and fiction when it is 'written' down and 'programmed' in. They became aware, to some extent, of concepts like interactivity. hyperlinks and lexias/emes and consequently of the complicated changes occurring historically in the two above mentioned forms without my having to bring in the academic jargon connected to such modifications which might have only ended up confusing them in the beginning.

In ESL at least immersion and the dual language format has to be employed simultaneously and the stress has to be on simple performance related objectives rather than mastery . This is common sense and not very novel but a few things can also be taken from the antiquated systems wherever essential.

I am unable to say everything that has to be said on all these topics due to the word limit and all that has been said has not been comprehensive .But all of it can definitely be used as pointers to start meaningful discussions in the hope that they will lead to reification of strategies of learning and facilitation, for steady improvement to occur .

The great king and patron of arts of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, was made to say by the script- writer, in a film about him, that we should start English schools in India because " We will conquer the language that is conquering the world." The sentence gripped my imagination . Fifty eight years after independance I can say that we Indians /I / many of our students have indeed conquered the language that is still conquering the world, even to the extent that we are producing writers in it that rival the best anywhere. But the price many of us have paid is less facility in our own languages. The democratization of English and the teaching of literature in this beautiful language has therefore to concentrate primarily on the objectives of ensuring that Englishes (SMS english, chat English, English in Kerala, English theory jargon) are encouraged as much as British English and that this is not done at the cost of other languages or of quality. Literary appreciation has to deal objectively with real-life students and actual situations in a graphic and interesting way so that true democratization takes place whereby all the students are enthused to love languages and its infinite possibilies and go away considering the learning of Language to be a " poetic experience"that ignites their love for the logos and the mythos in a teleological way, as in the parable of the sower and the seed so that the memory of it will be one of progressive instruction and mastery gained by delight as Horace wanted it to be and as Edenic as life's first learning experiences were and are. The only war we faciltators need to constantly wage, therefore, is one whereby there is a ceaseless effort to keep closing the gap between our notion of perfection and our consistently and constantly evolving practice.


By the way I removed the journalspace section so please don't click on it.





Tha's it folks. Now to edit and make it 2000 words. Wishing you all luck.

please read http://msn-cnet.com.com/Blogging+101--Web+logs+go+to+school/2100-1032_3-5895779.html?part=msn-cnet&subj=ns_3-5895779&tag=netcal

What would be a good title for this essay?

I'm unable to copy and post from MSWord doc to here. Damn. Anybody know the way to do it, please tell me.

I've already gone way past 2000 words, so this will need a hatchet.

Meanwhile, if you want to read my "work in progress" go here
http://papermoon.journalspace.com

If you can't go in just create a blog for yourself on journalspace; it's free, and look for the "papermoon" blog

The Essay - 3

What should concern prospective professional educators/teachers/ facilitators/ mediators/ gurus(experts/masters) and education theorists is, however, not just the definitions and the points of origin or the goals and aims of education, but the process itself. It is the process that needs to be monitored because it is the part of education that has had least light cast upon it from the detached and metacognitive perspective of thinkers and practitioners who critique and analyse what happens in education. They pay attention to precedents and antecedents, and study whether the new systems put in place of the old have met their objectives and have measurable outcomes that can be quantified as to whether they are more effective than what came before. While this might seem 'simplistic' generalization to some, and indeed it no doubt is if looked at from a positivist point of view, it is written with this end in mind that , to put it 'simply', no amount of attention paid to the process of education can be too little if education is to constantly improve.

The Essay (continued)

The simplest meanings of the words 'science' and 'education' , even after taking into consideration their etymological roots, are as follows:
Science: System of knowledge gained by systematic research and organized into general laws ; specific field of systematic knowledge; skill; proficiency
Education: Learning, instruction, imparting of knowledge, upbringing.
http://www.english-test.net/toeic/vocabulary/meanings/249/toeic-words.php#phpeducation
If science is basically - about - skill and proficiency all of us ought to be or are scientists to some extent. In the same way, all of us are 'partial' educators.

Stroke of luck and continuing frustration

Today I got into our discussion board and read some of the posts before I began getting the usual response of gateway error, server response unauthenticated etc. I am a bit frustrated because I'm unable to post either on the discussion board or on the ppseblog although I tried following Tara's directions. Guess tech has its flip side.


I want to play this by the rules of the game so I am going to stick to the 2000 word limit.

My essay starts like this.
First paragraph.

Horace's dictum that poetry should delight and instruct is where this tesseract would like to start drawing its lines from. If the word 'poetry' is replaced by the word' education', nothing would be lost. Education has to delight and instruction that comes through delight stays with the instructor and the instructed. Delight is one of the root meanings of the word Eden. In the evenings, an unlikely time for 'classes' to be held , the Maker (Vates/Poet) "came down" to have fellowship with mankind in the garden, an unlikely place for 'teaching', and asked him/her/them to give names to all the animals and spent instructive hours that were a delight/Paradise to the participants. Life can be paradise when it is a constant process of education where delight and instruction revolve around each other and are one in a constant harmony that forms a circle whereby instruction is passed on through delight and the delight its mastery gives leads to the desire for more instruction, till gradually the mediator of instruction recedes into the background so that the receptacle can become the new mediator in his/her turn. The father gives way to the son, the mother makes way for the daughter and the teacher gives pride of place to the student . The whole family of mankind yields to the next generation.