Wreading Parlor
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 This is a site where we read and write in response to the ideas of other readers and writers.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 You can think of it as digital version of Kenneth Burke’s “parlor,” his analogy for the dramatic, social, inherently rhetorical nature of our thinking.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
(Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. 1941. Univ. of California Press, 1973)
I come from a place with a totally differenct education environment with American. So when I read this article I have another different feeling with people who born in American and studied here.
First of all, I’ve took history class in US and in China. Here teachers pay a lot of attention on reasearch, we need to do presentation and speech about what we find out by ourself. But in China and some other Asian country all we need to do is take notes and memories them all before test. We don’t need to understand it or know anything else relate to the topic, test is the only thing matters.
Second of all, when I first came here, I couldn’t tell how surprise I was to be able to pick courses based on myself interest. My school in China, everyone have to take the same courses doesn’t matter if it’s useful to you or if you really like it. People who can do really well on math take the same math course with people who plan to take literature as major.
So we can’t really blame on them if they can’t do well on a subject.
Thirdly, in some coutries outside of US, teachers are seemd as authority and unjudgeable. As a student we only can do what they said although some times what they said could be wrong. In the test there is only one answer anything besides that will be defined as wrong.