Exploring Ourselves Through Contact

A friend just called my attention to another blogger's recent parody of a "compare-and-contrast" freshmen comp essay on the movies Curious George and Brokeback Mountain here; I highly recommend it. She also asked me to write a blog entry that includes a similar parody of first-year composition essays I wrote with my wife a few years ago. For your amusement, I am including it below. For their unit papers, all students are supposed to read three essays with three different points of view and essentially put them into dialogue with each other. All of the three authors (E. D. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy, Michel Foucault in History of Sexuality, and Mary Louise Pratt in "Arts of the Contact Zone") were available in the school's textbook reader. An additional freshmen comp practice alluded to in this entry is "workshopping": after students write their papers, they have other students "workshop" them (i.e. read them and make suggestions on how to improve them).

"Exploring Ourselves Through Contact"

Why is it that students don't have cultural literacy today? Why is it that students today don't know how to read, and grow up to be people who don't read? This is a very hard question, and there is no one right answer. But by prioritizing, we can come up with a solution that will make the classroom fun and solve the problem of literacy! By prioritizing, the problem of literacy, spoken of by Hirsch, Pratt, and Foucualt, can be solved!

The solution we are seeking for how to motivate students is simple: sex. Students of all ages like sex, as Foucault says. Sex has a great deal of power that we can utilize in the classroom; as Foucault says, "power comes from below" (169). Too often students are bad or fall asleep in class, because they are bored and teachers don't know how to arouse their interest. Education should be exciting. Pratt says basically the same thing as Foucault: "There were exhilerating moments of wonder and revelation. . . the joys of the contact zone," is how she describes her favorite class (402). I disagree with Pratt, though, in that I think you get the most exhilerating moments with sex. Just think of the improved literacy if sex were taught in the classroom!

I had a teacher in high school who really inspired me. We were not afraid to reveal parts of ourselves in our classroom, even if it was sometimes embarrassing. I think this is what Hirsch is trying to get at with cultural literacy. If everybody knows the same things, you can have unity, spiritually, mentally, and bodily, where everybody can make penetrating insights, both men and women. As Hirsch says, there is a "lack of wide-ranging background information among young men and women now in their twenties and thirties" (275), but if they had shared the contact zone, this wouldn't have happened. In order to communicate, sex must be taught. As Foucault said, "relationships ... are the basis for wide-ranging ... cleavage that run through the ... body as a whole" (169). Both Hirsch and Foucault agree that these things are “wide-ranging,” but I think that Foucault would say to Hirsch that he needs to say that information is power, which is like sex. But I think Hirsch would say that culturally literate people should use Shakespeare because you can communicate a lot with "There is a tide"(275), since four words can say what you'd need 27 for. But I think you can communicate deeply without words at all if you employ the contact zone.

It is never too early to start teaching the contact zone. When Pratt's son Manuel was in the contact zone, he said things were "Grate!!!!!!!!" because "it would let me play with my friends" (400) Think how much playing around we could have if we taught the contact zone earlier! Far more students could be fulfilled and motivated to learn!

Some teachers might not know how to teach the contact zone, which is why we can have night classes for the teachers to get them experienced in the subject, and instructional videos for the class. My teacher made his own instructional video for us, and it was great!

Teaching the contact zone is hard work, but if we have communication between students and teachers, we can do it. Sometimes we might have to keep it secret, since the administration just wouldn't understand, but that's only because they've never felt the "mutual understanding and new wisdom" (402) of the contact zone. Learning can take place outside the classroom too--my teacher told us we could always come to him about our problems, and even after he was suspended from teaching, he let us visit him at the video store he opened, even though we were underage.

I think if Hirsch had read Foucault and Pratt and met my teacher, he would have agreed with me. Really, what we need is to balance Hirsch, Foucault, and Pratt, and teach sex. They're all partly right but none of them can stand alone. Only when people come together in pairs, threesomes, or larger groups can real learning be achieved. This is why I love workshopping in groups. Like with Manuel, I can do so much more when I "play with my friends" (Pratt 400) than when I play with myself.