Attaining Intangible States A Personal Narrative and a Lesson in Applied Philosophy

A Teacher Pursuing Intangible States
original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit

Last post, I wrote about a powerful, impersonal kind of certainty that, under the best circumstances, a teacher feels about the instructions she gives. The incident of the classroom interloper, which I chose to illustrate that certainty, is an especially clear example, but in the course of my two months teaching precalc, there have been countless subtler instances in which this sense of the inevitability of my injunctions has come to my aid. It is the first time in my teaching career (now in its fifth year) that I have felt this kind of sureness, and of course, it’s thrilling.

When I taught at an inner-city No-Excuses charter school two years ago, I had the opposite experience. I was deeply insecure and hesitating. I expected my instructions to meet resistance, and they almost always did; and when that resistance was forceful, as it often was, my very dignity and pride were threatened.

On Vividness of Language and Experience

The Carding of Wool

The Trying of Fat

A reader—alright, let’s be honest here: my dad—left a comment on this blog regarding Dewey’s language in the passage that I excerpted last week. His point seems to me so interesting and so consonant with Dewey’s own beliefs, that I want to address a brief post to the subject. The comment itself is excellently written, and I reproduce it here in full:

What strikes me first in the Dewey passage is the vividness and specificity of his language. The "carding" of wool, the "trying" of fat, a whole world of natural processes and self-sufficiency for which we no longer have even the words. The passage helps explain, among many other things, the richness of Shakespeare's imagery. He lived the life Dewey is describing in which human beings actually made the things they used and understood, therefore, in a way we cannot, the material world around them and the properties of the objects in it, the weight of the cloth, sharpness of the tool, the density of this wood and the flexibility of that one. They saw and knew (knew and saw) the world they lived in, and their language for describing it was abundant, particular and precise.