Doing It Wrong

[Beloved xkcd comic "Duty Calls," by Randall Munro]

“You know I’ll never ask you to change /
I’ll only ask you to try”
—The Hold Steady, “Hurricane J“

If you have been on the internet longer than about 8 minutes, then someone has probably alerted you that you are doing it wrong. (Because you are. For real.)

Productivity systems and websites make this gesture their stock-in-trade: Tell readers that they are, in fact, doing it wrong, thus establishing decisively your own superiority. (After all, you’re the one who knows the right way to do it!) When I first described ProfHacker to friends, they imagined that it would look very like the comic above.

That’s not really the way ProfHacker works. We don’t really know what you’re doing wrong. Plus, we don’t think academe works that way. As Matthew Arnold said of Oxford, higher education is the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs. The whole idea is to provide a diversity of viewpoints, methods, and perspectives, in order both to preserve old wisdom and to allow a space for new knowledge to emerge. Also, none of us are formally trained in any of this stuff—we’re just some people trying to get by.

Still, if you look back through the archive, it certainly seems to be the case that someone is doing it wrong. Post after post suggests that someone isn’t getting as much writing done as they should, or grading fast enough, or rigorously enough, or they’re printing without considering the environment. So, if you aren’t doing it wrong, who, precisely, is?

By way of an answer, here’s a story that I think* Jacques-Alain Miller tells about reading Jacques Lacan. Lacan usually begins his seminars by denouncing the foolish psychoanalytic orthodoxy that holds this or that view, before going on to develop an evermore highly-refined version of his return to Freud. The force of Lacan’s critique would be so scathing, Miller says, one might well wonder, “who could ever think such a thing?”

The answer, in the anecdote, is of course Lacan himself. The seminar turns into an exercise in rethinking one’s own assumptions, rather than an exercise in enforcing orthodoxy.

I’ve always found this story charming. And it speaks to something important about ProfHacker: We’re interested in moments of failure—failures of teaching, of research/creative activity, of service, of wellness—and in figuring out how to get better. The pedagogical idea I’ve been most associated with over the past several years is the “wikified class notes” project that’s now the core of all my classes. In the original description of that assignment, I pointed out that many students don’t take notes in English classes, and so the assignment in effect forced them to do so, plus it made them a little better at taking notes.

Looking back at the assignment now, it’s also clear that the assignment was born out of terror: What if I have nothing to teach? What, exactly, have I been doing in my classes? Unpacking that question leads you into some pretty interesting places—to what extent is it possible to teach anything? Who, ultimately, is responsible for education? How can that learning be improved? Assessed? &c.

To return to the comic: ProfHacker exists, not to correct others’ errors, but because we believe that we can all be something bigger [YouTube].

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* Can’t find the cite right now—and it may not even be Miller, or it could be someone like Zizek or Catherine Clement retailing this story at third-hand. But this is a blog, and there’s an upper limit to the amount of time I’m willing to spend chasing down apocryphal stories for a blog post.

For those who don’t recognize the comic, it’s xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”; its existence is proof that the internet was worth it after all. (Why take my word for it? There’s a song! [YouTube]) There are far worse things you could do with any spare cash than shovel it at the xkcd webstore. Signed prints! Posters! Stickers! Shirts! &c.