Hiatus Redux

It's been a long time that I've been away from this blog, and there are still many holes in it. The holes are to be filled from a drawer of little paper stubs with writing on them, the drawer being real and also virtual, and the paper likewise.

As I write (or type, or otherwise compose for viewing) this short piece, I think of how difficult it must have been in the past to transfer one's trivial or otherwise quotidian thoughts to someone else. You'd have had to compose them carefully, and the recipient to receive them thoughtfully. You would not have had the throwaway ease of the electronic note, or even of paper, in past eras.

And here we are, generations succeedingly more deprived of the ability to focus our attention on information and its construction. Sometimes, there must be long gaps of peace amidst the tumult of our war.

The Shining

Halfway between the morning exam and the afternoon paper, a friend of mine inveigled me into accompanying him to the movies. Being young and pointlessly fearless, we hopped on the shuttle bus and went off to watch Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It was mind-boggling, and perhaps the reason why we then went on to do better in the latter half of our O-levels.

The horrific rush of events that pretended to be a story, the huge amounts of money Stephen King must've made off it, the icy landlocked claustrophobia of the empty hotel — all these are as nothing compared to the terror-filled career of life. Not for nothing is the original meaning of that deceptive word 'career' that of the course of a chariot (same etymology as for 'car') hurtling down the road, or that of the sun flaming out across the sky.

And suddenly, my blog is splintered into two parts — a log of random fragments (something like a chipboard stump) and what you're reading right now, the longer bits jutting out once a week like sprouts shining from the spring snow.

Writing

Writing is an exercise for mind and fingers. You trap the elusive fact with the gossamer web. You construct the tapestry. You knit and knot. You sieve and strain. When we talk about settings, you realise we will have to decide between a single great gem or several small ones, or none at all; when we talk about plot, you realise we will have to decide what to grow on the allotment.

The moving finger writes, and having writ, one sees it doesn't really give a sh.

Clarity and Clarification

One should always write clearly. It's not necessarily true that a simple sentence is clear. But the intent should be there. If something is meant to be ambiguous, it should be obviously so. If it is saying something, let it say that thing.

There are two sins to be considered:
1) is there complexity without clarity?
2) is there confusion without clarification?

These things, like the poisons of the classical past, can be made as clear as water. Stir with a unicorn's horn, or take up the pen that is mightier than the sword and strike the errors down.

Tenement Block

There are too many stories, as someone once pointed out. As another person told me, I'm supposed to be writing a thesis, not a novel. Yes, there are indeed too many bits for a single narrative.

So it was that the Uncle told me to submit my dissertation and save the rest for the book. That's interesting advice. It makes a lot of sense.

Sarcophagus

A sarcophagus is something which 'eats the flesh'; the word sarx in Greek means 'flesh'. This came out of a random thought I had as I looked at a picture of the pyramids and thought of the great age of those mighty monuments.

And then I remembered the Greek word anaimosarke. This word means 'flesh without blood', or alternatively, 'not of flesh and blood'. It is used in an ancient poem about the cicada, a merry fellow which seems to be anaimosarke.

And I remembered further. I remembered a post from seven years ago. In that long-ago silence, something stirred. I remember an inquisition, and someone telling me that this post was about somebody else. I remember thinking, "This is nonsense, my post is about Superman and Batman!"

The problem in this post-modern age is that it's not about what you intended when you wrote something, but what people think you intended, what people can twist your writing to mean, and what people can say you have influenced other people to write. Whether you did any of it is immaterial. It's the Macavity Syndrome. And when that strikes, it is as good as eating your flesh and everything else in it.

This isn't to excuse anything ill-considered in my own writing. I have written things that I have been sorry for afterwards. And honestly, deeply so. But I am a little upset to be blamed for things I did not write.

Yet, there are still things that abide. Faith, hope and love, for example.

One Week Left

OWL = 'One Week Left'. That is how I feel about my self-imposed deadline. I like owls. I just don't like the way people use them to say all kinds of things any self-respecting owl would deny.

In this case, an owl would just say, "Suck it up. Spit it out. In a little ball. Win."

I am having problems with the 'in a little ball' part. Sigh. Also, I note that you don't want to be 'full of win'. You should just win, and go on to the next target.

Compulsition

I used to dread 'composition' periods in English because they tended to render me unfit for the rest of the day. When made to write, I am a compulsive writer. I do not always have a compulsion to write, but once the impulse is formed, it compels.

The handing up of a 'compo' book to the teacher always used to make me feel as if I were giving a child away for adoption. I guess it is worse than that, in a way — you're giving away your child to have someone else stare critically and tiredly at it, and then make red marks in pen all over.

And now, I keep writing new stuff into my largest ever. My supervisor stands at the door and knocks (metaphorically). The ferryman grins mirthlessly. And soon I will have to give this one up for adoption into the literature of the time. Argh.

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Note: I hereby define 'compulsition' as a compulsion to continue composing that derives from, or is initiated by, the act of starting to compose.

Writ(h)ing

Trapped in the anaconda coils. Long sentences are serpents, short sentences are wolves. The latter hunt in packs. My thesis is like a lump of jade buried in a ruined temple, itself embedded in a jungle, a forest, a continent of information and seething research.

The best advice I ever got was: just write and worry about editing later.

The worst advice I ever got was: just write and worry about structure later.

There is no justice in writing. There just is writing. Lots of it, in this world of 2011 AD.

I have a student who doesn't bother spelling. He just types an approximation and clicks to invoke the spell-checker. Then he picks the right spell (write spell?) from the drop-down menu that appears. Prefab spells.

There is no more place for the sorcerer of words, the magician of phrases, except in bookshops at more than $15 a pop. But I need the alchemy of the old, the formality that gives form, the illumination of the dream.

Trapped in the anaconda coils, I ponder my next move even as my ribs groan from the pressure.

Cutting, Polishing

All around, I hear the sounds of cutting and polishing. A diamond-edged (or at least carborundum-edged) blade is cutting through concrete, maybe steel. It is far away, but shrill and loud. You can almost smell the metal, the grease, the static and the diesel generator. There is dusty death in the air.

In front of me is a mass of material. I think there must be 300,000 words of it. It has to be cut down to somewhere around 80,000. Woe is me.

Cut boldly. Polish finely.

Easy to say. I am going mad.

Elegant Argumentation

Sometimes, people write stuff. Most of the time, it is badly-written stuff. Occasionally, it transcends that and becomes lucid, well-designed stuff. In some cases, I wish I had written something like that, especially if it concerns a domain that could do with lucid, well-designed prose arguments.

That's the case with Yawning Bread's pair of articles on legalism. [Part I] [Part II]

I once wrote a piece on jurisprudence, but it wasn't a lawyerly piece of work, either for good or ill. It was just philosophy, I think.

Now, I have many former students studying to be lawyers. And many friends who are lawyers. They would probably laugh. Or worse. And deploy some elegant argumentation of their own in my direction.

Why Student Output Should Be Better (But Isn't)

25 years ago, I was an 18 year old person in senior high. If we did research at all, it was mainly in a reasonably well-stocked library, or from our own collections of material. We sometimes had files of newspaper clippings, sorted by topic and date.

A lot of that (though not all) has now been made redundant simply because most schools now purchase online access to journals and newspapers. Simple search functions linking to any of those databases will produce a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles. In conjunction with Google™ Scholar and Wikipedia, a student can literally research and produce a paper on any topic, running at around 2000 words, in less than 400 minutes, maybe even less than six hours.

25 years ago, this was just barely possible, except that you would have to read piles of material because there was no search function and you'd have to rely on the occasional annual index of topics that kind journal-publishers might produce, or on the experience (and philanthropy) of the person manning the morgue at the newspaper office. If you were fortunate, you had a knowledgeable librarian.

And yet, the quality of student work these days is poor. Each paper is generally poorly referenced, and the references selected are often poor themselves. The argument doesn't hang together, and neither does the structure.

Why is this so?

I have an idea, developed after many years of talking to high school students and asking them about their work processes. It's a pretty sad idea.

I think that students don't read enough.

Search functions identify quotes which they can use in their papers, but they have seldom read the entire book or chapter from which these quotes have been lifted. Because the context has not been read through and analysed, the quotes are unjustified or simply taken out of context in the worst way possible.

Students don't read around the topic anymore, because instead of homing in on their material, they jump straight to it. It's like the subway or MRT. If you pop up in the middle of a neighbourhood, you only know the area around the station, and your knowledge of context and related material diminishes sharply as the distance increases.

Students don't read enough often because their teachers and librarians don't read enough. My personal library consists of about 8000 books. This is small, and in the age of the Internet, it ought to be redundant (and often is). But when I research a paper, I end up with a bibliography; a 25-page paper with perhaps 8000-10000 words in it takes a week for first draft because I have normally read an average of 500 pages from various sources while planning and writing that paper.

If a student comes to me with a topic, I can often recommend books or journal articles or websites because I've seen them, read them, or know someone who has. And if I can't recommend sources, I use Google™ like everybody else, or Wikipedia. But if I do, I take the additional step of trying to triangulate my sources to see if they agree. If I can find only one source, and it is not linked to any other, I can't in good conscience recommend it as an authority unless there are seriously good reasons to do so.

It all boils down to three things: receive a lot of input, think a lot about it, structure it into consistent output. That provides basic quality. Style, grammar, neatness — all this provides extended quality. But any kind of quality requires hard work.

The final bit of hard work is reading your own stuff critically. You need to read it aloud, if possible. This exposes the silly stuff better. Sometimes, under the influence of sleep deprivation or bad environmental pollution, you write silly things. It's best to pretend your paper was written by someone you hate and that you will get a cash reward for finding mistakes in it, arm yourself with a red pen for hard copy or something like those awful comment flags in MS Word™, and attack your own work.

This phase takes a lot of time, for me. I literally read and re-read everything I publish, several times. Unfortunately (as some of you have noticed) I do this less for my blog posts. I don't like making mistakes, though. That means I make some attempt to find mistakes, will amend them as soon as I find them, and will confess them if some poor sod has already been subjected to them.

Students these days claim they haven't enough time. I just wonder how much less time they would have had in the days before advanced search and online databases, before YouTube and Wikipedia, before the ability to download digital versions of key documents within minutes. They have less excuse for mediocrity than I had.

One final rant about reading: why can't students bother to look things up for themselves, given all the online help they currently have? I hate it when students ask me for definitions of things, places, people or ideas. It's all online!

Yesterday, I had coffee with a young man who lamented the difficulty of training educators. He asked how I would go about it. Well, I told him that each person should be educated in a different way, but that there were some key requirements.

I told him that first of all, a person should have read all the fundamental texts (or at least, enough texts to cover the fundamentals) of the subject to be taught. A general educator should have a broader and more difficult reading list than a specialised educator.

Secondly, the person to be 'trained' (I hate that word in this context; it reminds me of dog obedience school) needs to develop the capacity for interacting with people, listening to feedback (verbal or non-verbal) and tweaking the interaction as it progresses. You need to try as hard as you can to understand the people you're teaching, and you need to feel apologetic if you don't quite 'get' them.

Thirdly, the person needs to be able to detect bullshit both in what is taught and in the responses of students. Yes, self-critical as well as other-critical analysis is required. You shouldn't lie to students even by accident. If you don't know something, say so. If you have made a mistake, admit it and apologize.

If students are badly taught, then their role-models of learning are deficient. This is another reason why student output is bad; their input and learning models are bad too. As my grandfather used to say, "Why do children misbehave? Because their parents do!"

In most parts of the world that I've seen, I estimate that perhaps one teacher out of every 20 is a good one. The quality tends to be worse if the organization is larger, unless a lot of money is spent and a lot of research and evaluation is carried out in the attempt to 'buy' good staff. That means students have to be good self-teachers most of the time.

I wish my own students all the best. I try to give them my best, being fully aware that it's never enough. But they should also aim to do better, by reading, thinking, and being self-critical — and by remembering that the best is always yet to be.

Synthesis

Today one of my professional colleagues paid me the compliment of saying that I was a 'real pro at synthesizing'. Coming from this person, I took it in the spirit intended; that is to say, 'a professional at reconciling multiple viewpoints and presenting them as a seamless tapestry'.

Yes, at the very least, I have become an essayist with historical tendencies. That's not so bad. I stand in good company with many who I would otherwise not qualify to stand with by virtue of quality. But like Newton, I suppose I can say that if I have seen further, it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants.

I've had two of my papers enter the final pre-publication phase in one week. I've come to realise that if I string all the beads together in the right way, I will be able to make the big deadline soon. The problem is that there are so many beads.

Well, maybe I'll be able to put them together like the facets of an insect's eye and produce, miraculously, some sort of coherent vision. When that happens, I shall have won this war. I shall feel most Maccabaean.

Writing a TOK Essay (Part V): Structuring the Argument

One might argue that unfolding an argument is as good as structuring it. That's not quite true. You can unfold a dress, but structuring it so that it unfolds nicely is a fine art.

In general, writing any essay begins with a quick survey of the key ideas. What is the question explicitly about? What is it implicitly about? Are you imagining the implicit? (Strictly speaking, what is implicit is what you can infer from the bare text, by use of logic alone, but within the ToK context.)

For example, supposing you're looking at a question that talks about language and reason being important in history. The choice of history as the area of knowledge or discipline is not unexpected; after all, history is one of the key disciplines in the overarching framework of human knowledge. However, the choice of language and reason implies that they are being set up as two interlocking parts of the definition of history; they're not necessarily in opposition, but they at the very least to be seen as complementary.

Defining history, language and reason is simple. Just take care to define history as an area of knowledge and the other two as ways of knowing — after all, this is in the context of writing a ToK essay. You also need to know that the main problem of history is veracity — how do you know that history is real? What are the tests for valid histories?

Once you've laid the definitional groundwork, you need to see how language and reason interact in the construction of history. Language is the medium that supplies (or conveys) much of the raw material, reason is the process through which the material is assembled into a useful structure.

Then point out the several problems of language in terms of information loss (at the source, during transmission, failure of recording, failure of reception, etc) and do a few paragraphs with examples about that. Follow that with the problems of reason in terms of information construction (validity, reliability, utility etc) and do a few paragraphs with examples as well.

You can now write about how these problems might be overcome, then summarise the roles of language and reason in the domain of history. Point out how histories can be improved by the proper application of the historian's discernment and artifice, as a conclusion based on your earlier paragraphs dealing with problems.

And... you're done.

Structure is easy: definitions, issues, problems, disposing of problems, conclusions based on what has been raised. You've probably got weeks to do it, and you probably only need two or three days. Anyone who is using more time than that is obviously wasting time somewhere.

Writing a TOK Essay (Part IV): Unfolding the Argument

In my previous post on this subject, I wrote about the importance of definitions and some approaches to the definition of terms. The thing about definitions is that they lead, by various forms of reason, to certain arguments. As such arguments unfold, we have to be careful to examine them to see if we are not blinded by preconceptions (constructed frameworks) or prejudices (judgements in advance).

For example, a student recently told me that there was the case of a girl whose mental age was fixed in early childhood (I think it was three months) by a biological defect. A case was advanced for keeping her, by elective surgery, at a pre-adolescent stage of physical development. One argument against this was that it would deprive her of her sexual rights.

There are many arguments you could advance, but this is definitely (and definitively) not one of them. The counter-argument is obvious: in almost all jurisdictions, the mentally incompetent are protected from abuse by law. This child will never have the ability to give legal consent to sexual behaviour, and hence will never have the legal capacity to exercise sexual rights.

The point of this example is that definitions constrain us, but we can choose which set of definitions to apply. In this case, we might argue that all humans in general have a right to sexual enjoyment. That's very abstract; in practice, society governs this by laws which protect the vulnerable. Once we define which humans are allowed these rights, and under what conditions, the case becomes much clearer.

Similarly, the argument that history is fundamentally different from science is not an easy one to make. I've mentioned this before. If you define history accurately, you will see that it is, if you like, the grandfather of science (philosophy is the grandmother). Science as we know it was once divided into natural history (observations of reality) and natural philosophy (theories of reality).

Because of this definitional background, if asked to choose two disciplines (or areas of knowledge) as examples of different approaches, you should choose things that are more unalike. It's possible to argue that history and geography are less alike than history and science (or than geography and science, heh).

The primary reason that I've used the phrase 'unfolding the argument' here, therefore, is that if you've already started by defining the terms, sometimes those definitions will automatically unfold into points of argument. It's like a battlefield; the disposition of terrain features and forces on both sides will make certain tactical options more likely and others less likely. In some cases (for example, the one ford over a river that one side must cross), it's quite clear that there is one obvious option.

The secondary argument is that one should be careful to 'unfold the argument' step by step. It's like reverse origami; you have a crane, can you decompose the crane into folds? If you do it correctly, the logic of the argument will be clear and the examiner will be less irritated by it. Sloppy folding leads to sloppy unfolding; sloppy unfolding can lead to tearing of the material that was folded.

Writing a TOK Essay (Part I): Before You Begin

TOK, of course, stands for 'Theory of Knowledge'; this is the title of what is perhaps the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme's most notorious element. I used to teach people how to write TOK essays. I still do. I've done it myself a fair number of times. What impels me most forcefully into the writing of this post is the hash that some people make of it (either the teaching or the writing).

It's not a difficult task. It's just one that needs reasonably careful, self-critical and accurate writing, for fewer than ten hours of your time. The TOK essay-writing process can be broken into three general parts: surveying, writing it out, and evaluating your own work. The latter two feed off each other until you reach the final version.

Here is a list of things to do (and questions to ask) before you begin, in the survey phase.

1. Read the list of prescribed essay titles carefully. Do any of them look interesting? Can you outline a five-sentence argument (definition, approach, elaboration, examples, conclusion — or the equivalents, which are many) for one of them without looking up any sources? If so, you can cautiously conclude that this topic is a good candidate for your further attention.
2. Looking at the topic, can you pick out the key words and define them succinctly and exactly to your own satisfaction? If so, you are either very easily satisfied or you are good enough at thinking up definitions. Don't fall back on a dictionary or encyclopaedia; if you need to, you don't know the material well enough.
3. Based on the topic, are there any obvious knower's approaches, ways of knowing, or areas of knowledge that need to be addressed? If so, are you familiar with the issues associated with each of them? Which knowledge issues are implicated?
4. Do you have first-hand experience of anything related to these issues? What were your thoughts and responses like?
5. Based on the definitions you've used, can you trace a thread of argument that links the definitions, key points, and your own responses into a consistent and coherent structure?
6. If so, what conclusion will you probably reach, and is it likely to answer the question you began with?

These are very general points, but I am certain I've addressed specific issues elsewhere in this blog.

For those of you who know who I am and where my public folder is, there are some resources available in the TOK subfolder. Copyright is retained by me for some of those, so please don't abuse your public access. Apart from that, you are welcome to look around and use them to help you plan your line of attack. In the days ahead, I'll look at the writing phase and the evaluation phase. But I won't do that yet, since those of you who need to pick a topic should do that first.

Kakodaimon

It's amazing to see what kind of racket has taken the place of the old gangsters and pirates. Nowadays, it's something like this, which is as evil as it sounds. What you do is submit your own papers, and whenever someone purchases a copy of it (at a price of something like US$30 and up), the 'information facilitator' takes 50% and you take 50%.

I can see how someone else's term paper might be useful to me if I needed one in a hurry. What really boggles the mind is how bad the US$30 papers (and even the US$50 papers) really are. I would say that trawling through this blog will get you better stuff for free. In fact, I know that I can write 24 pages of stuff and earn about US$800 for it, which makes it US$100 for 3 pages.

This means that the paper mill is actually pretty cheap. And that is what you get; cheap American (well, mostly) swill with bad grammar, bad spelling, bad ideas — all palmed off on an unsuspecting but desperate public.

Advice for the Perplexed

I have a simple piece of advice for the twenty or so of you who have asked me the same kind of question. That question, roughly put, is this: "What if my supervisor/reader looks at my essay and grades me according to measures I can't see in the rubrics?"

In this particular context, your supervisor/reader actually is only assigning a preliminary grade and someone out there will independently be marking your essay and assigning a real grade. Therefore my advice is this: ask for an explanation based on the rubrics, and if such is not forthcoming or the person begins to blather, prevaricate, or otherwise show ignorance of the influence of the rubrics, ignore this person. On the other hand, if the comments he/she makes are linked (validly and usefully) to specific items in the marking rubric, pay careful attention.

It's that simple. I have little patience for people who forget the use of marking rubrics and decide they want to shape your stuff according to other considerations.

The Write Stuff

There's a problem with craftsmanship and complexity; there's a problem with the 3 Cs — comprehension, composition and computation; there's a problem with consideration and cogitation. That's 7 Cs altogether, and not a single ocean.

The thing is this: you can get simple hacks to teach how to write sentences. You can get simple hacks to teach how to string them together in some order. And you can get these simple hacks to be English teachers, and everyone will be satisfied if only simple constructs are to be expressed. I mean, "See Spot run!" is pretty easy, and if you want to make Spot go through some adventures too, that's fine.

But the thing is that if you're going to craft a rock, there is large margin for error; if you want to make a sundial, there's a whole lot less; and if you want to assemble a clock, there's preferably as little error as humanly possible. The same applies to the writing of complex essays.

And that's where things have begun to go wrong. A simple essay with the only restriction that you write about the topic given can be hacked out of raw stone (so to speak) in about 20 minutes or less. A literary essay can be designed, sourced and hacked out in about a day or so. But an essay which discusses epistemology and requires more than passing acquaintance with several fields of knowledge, an understanding of various ways of knowing, and a personal engagement with the material that shines out from the murkiness — ha, this is not so easy, especially if the word limit is brutally tight.

If you want to teach people to write these things, you can't be just an ordinary hack. The apprenticeship model for clockmakers is a lot more rigorous than the apprenticeship model for brickmakers. For both, composition of the raw material and comprehension of what it can do (and how it should do it) are essential. But the former requires a lot more computation, a lot more exactitude, and a lot more craft than the latter. You need to be able to handle complexity with tighter tolerances.

If you want to learn how to make something, look at the craftsmanship of the person who is going to teach you. If you want a person to teach something, you should ask them to show that they can do it first. In a school system, if a person gets to university and qualifies in a subject, that normally means they can make bricks and even houses. But it doesn't mean they can build windmills and television sets and clocks.

If making the simplest brick house is tough, making the simplest working mechanical clock is tougher. And if you get brickmakers to make both, the first will be functional and the second will be crap.

Spike

Hurrrrr. The picture I'm assembling in my mind is not anywhere as pleasant as the cardboard jigsaw puzzles of my youth. Rather, it is a litany of obfuscatory, mendacious and ill-considered pagan rituals. It reminds me of my bedtime reading from that long-lost youth: The Glory that was Greece, The Grandeur that was Rome and other such archaeological tributes to civilisations that no longer occupy the lands which now contain their descendants.

The buildings stand, the chronological heritage stands, perhaps the legal occupancy is indisputable. But the heirs cheated and lied and stole and thought to befuddle the historians (if they ever thought of such at all). And as it was with Agamemnon, that most ambitious of the Atreides (beautiful word, that, in all four syllables), the end will be ignominious and rather sad.

I suppose that's what you get for writing stories and poems when sitting around feeling bleak. Then again, there is always a bright spot. As Hopkins says in The Windhover:

...blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.