Posted on 12/26/2021 6:58:49 PM PST by Rummyfan
WITH THE QUICKENING CASCADE of political, social, and natural crises in our country, the faith in progress—the belief that good will and steady work leads to a better world—is a difficult faith to maintain. There have been times when the arc of history seemed to bend toward justice. But lately it’s snapped back the other way. It’s as if we’ve heaved a great boulder toward the mountain top, and we’re now watching it, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, as it careens back to the ground below. It feels that there is something absurd, in fact literally Sisyphean, to our predicament.
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You see, while the dire question that drove Camus to write The Myth of Sisyphus was “whether life is worth living,” I am confronted by a more modest question: whether teaching is worth doing.
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Like the blips of a sonar, student papers suggest my students are mostly floating on the surface. For them to piece words together in their papers is as difficult as it is for them to pick through the words in their books. There are, of course, the usual litter of dependent clauses, run-on sentences running into themselves, the clutter of incomplete sentences, and the Dadaist-inspired word choices. More telling, though, is that the papers often seem to be written in the same way that someone who never having seen a plane tries to draw one based on its definition. Hence the papers I am reading on intra-subjectivity that are in search of a subject, the papers on existential ambiguity wrapped in syntactical ambiguity, the papers on Dasein—the state of “being thrown into the world”—that are thrown together at random.
(Excerpt) Read more at thebaffler.com ...
This guy kind of writes like someone who has never seen a plane but is trying to draw one based on its definition.
We were assigned The Plague in senior English. I thought the title aptly described my opinion of Albert Camus.
Timing is everything.
I had been refreshing my Camus over the past weeks.
If the kids are sisyphean for their futile efforts, at least they are secure with their participation trophys.
Embracing the suck is an accomplishment after all.
It is said that even most professional philosophers don’t fully comprehend what Heidegger meant by “dasein”.
The kids around here seem more interested in shoving their suck on the rest us these days. Wokeism. They deserve a plague.
“It is said that even most professional philosophers don’t fully comprehend what Heidegger meant by “dasein”.
I remember when some wise guy sent an actor to a Modern Language Association conference and had him read an incomprehensible essay filled with academic jargon. No one caught on.
“The amount of time twelfth graders spent on screens skyrocketed from three to more than six hours a day between 2006 and 2015, according to the psychologist Jean Twenge, author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. In this zero-sum game, the amount of time spent with books cratered. In the late 1970s, 60 percent of twelfth graders read a book or magazine every day; by 2016, that percentage dropped to 16 percent. About one-third, moreover, did not read a single book for pleasure in 2016.”
Our culture became a screen culture. No one really knows where we are headed, but it’s hard for me to imagine someone looking back from the year 2050 and thinking the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, the smart phone and social media was this really great thing for society.
FReegards
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