{"id":104,"date":"2008-02-24T11:11:12","date_gmt":"2008-02-24T16:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/02\/24\/the-curmudgeon-of-eng-610-asks-two-questions\/"},"modified":"2008-02-24T11:11:12","modified_gmt":"2008-02-24T16:11:12","slug":"the-curmudgeon-of-eng-610-asks-two-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/02\/24\/the-curmudgeon-of-eng-610-asks-two-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"The Curmudgeon of ENG 610 Asks Two Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At dinner last night, my husband and I engaged in one of our usual spirited conversations. This one began with theories of leadership that I&#8217;m studying in another course, but honestly, we could have been talking about goat herding. The topic didn&#8217;t matter. After several volleys, Cornell told me that I enjoy arguing. Moi? Enjoy arguing? \u00a0I jabbed back that he couldn&#8217;t be more wrong. I lock horns with Cornell during these discussions, I said, because I have strong opinions. That&#8217;s all.However, reading my four blog posts up in my office early this Sunday morning (while Cornell is downstairs eating breakfast), I have something to admit to all of you, my colleagues. Surprise, surprise, I see that my dear husband is right. The truth is that I&#8217;m downright cantankerous.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t realize until right now that each of my first four blog posts for ENG 610 <em>argues<\/em> something, and that that something is without exception based upon a negative. Here&#8217;s what I mean:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Blog Post 1: I argue that my instructors failed me by not teaching me how to read poetry and for not sharing with me that poetry is difficult.<\/li>\n<li>Blog Post 2: I argue that Bass&#8217;s oral assessment method is cause for concern &#8211; three concerns, in fact.<\/li>\n<li>Blog Post 3: I argue that the way we teach literature studies today is just a fashion trend &#8211; as was New Criticism &#8211; and that things will change again.<\/li>\n<li>Blog Post 4: I argue that the lecture still has merit as a teaching and learning tool despite the fact that practically everyone says it doesn&#8217;t.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So Question #1 is: Why does Laura Hills keep coming at these blog entries with both fists up and so much vinegar and sass running through her veins?\u00a0 Do I really just like to argue for argument&#8217;s sake?<\/p>\n<p>Yes. When tasked with writing and posting my response to the readings in this course, my first thought each and every time is: <em>What&#8217;s wrong? What&#8217;s troubling? Where did the author leave himself\/herself open for a knockout punch? <\/em>And, dear readers,<em> what will make for interesting reading <\/em>for you<em>, <\/em>my darlings<em>?<\/em> \u00a0I don&#8217;t want to tell you week after week what is right or good in what we&#8217;re reading. That&#8217;s a snooze. I focus instead on what is <em>wrong,<\/em> where the <em>weaknesses<\/em> are, where I can stick my scalpel, open the patient wide for you, and expose the hidden infection so you&#8217;ll see it and recoil in horror.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s most interesting to me about this observation is that in most human interactions, I&#8217;m not like this at all. I&#8217;m actually a nice person. <em>Really.<\/em> I am always the one looking for points of agreement between disputants, seeking ways we can achieve consensus, thinking about what makes us more alike than different. Ask the people I work with. Ask my students. They&#8217;ll tell you that I dwell on the good and that I&#8217;m the heart of the little university where I work. That leads me to:<\/p>\n<p>Question #2: Why am I such a curmudgeon when it comes particularly to intellectual tasks like theoretical dinner table conversations with my husband and reading texts?<\/p>\n<p>I suppose I&#8217;m no different from the rats in B. F. Skinner&#8217;s famous experiments. I run through my maze and press my little bar time and time again to get my little pellet of food. I argue in these situations because it&#8217;s hugely rewarding for me to do so. I&#8217;ve made the bulk of my money in my career not as a teacher but as a writer. Sass gets me the big bucks. (Figurative bucks, folks. They&#8217;re not all that big.) My ability to argue has also gotten me a bucket of A&#8217;s throughout school. Here I am in my last course for my doctoral program &#8211; nine years into my graduate school odyssey &#8212; and I see that I&#8217;ve built my academic career and success hugely upon argumentation. There are big rewards for taking the low road.<\/p>\n<p>Argumentation has also become personally gratifying for me. If I told you in blog posts that Randy Bass and Sheridan Blau have great ideas, I&#8217;d not only probably bore you all into a stupor but I&#8217;d feel useless. It&#8217;s far more interesting, fresher, fun and satisfying for me to spit tacks at them. Frankly, it feels good to land a good one right on the kisser every now and then. In some circles, they call that <em>scholarship. <\/em>(Sorry, fellow 610-ers, there&#8217;s that sass again.)<\/p>\n<p>In the spirit of learning something new this term, I&#8217;d like to try an experiment and I need your help. Next week, when we write blog posts based upon our readings, I promise to focus mine entirely on positives. I won&#8217;t point out faults or weaknesses or concerns or predict gloom and doom. This will be difficult for me. But I&#8217;m willing to play nice just this once to see how it feels. Then I can figure out what to do next.<\/p>\n<p>What I need from you guys is to read what I write next week and to tell me what you think of it &#8211; <em>really<\/em> think of it. I&#8217;m going to let the curmudgeon take a holiday. But first, I&#8217;m going to join my husband for breakfast. I need to ask him to read this and to tell him that he was right. Oy! &#8211; Laura Hills<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At dinner last night, my husband and I engaged in one of our usual spirited conversations. This one began with theories of leadership that I&#8217;m studying in another course, but honestly, we could have been talking about goat herding. The topic didn&#8217;t matter. After several volleys, Cornell told me that I enjoy arguing. Moi? Enjoy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[59,55,58,57,56],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}