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| -by Martini |
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We’ve all seen countless stories about the barrel-bottom-scraping state the American educational system is in.1 Typically, the bad news comes to us either in the form of a Newsweek Special Report and Collectible Pull-Out Section, or tacked on to a segment of Dateline NBC during a slow spot — which is generally defined as any time Stone "Chin" Phillips isn’t droning on about the dangers of SUVs in order to stall while the effects crew finishes duct-taping fifty pounds of Semtex to the underside of a Toyota RAV-4. For the most part, it’s all the same story: prophecies of intellectual doom and gloom liberally sprinkled with statistical breakdowns that look like the nightly shooting percentage for the L.A. Clippers. Evidently, American high school kids can’t read, write, ’rithmetize, spell, think critically, remember historical events, or point out anything on a map more challenging than the Rand McNally trademark. And then they hit college. And people like me have to deal with them. You see — in my other life — I’m one of the thousands of graduate students across this attention-deficient nation who act as teaching assistants, exam graders, and overall catchers-in-the-intellectual-rye for the graduating classes of the next millennium. I enjoy it most of the time, to be honest. I mean, I wouldn’t be pursuing a Ph.D.2 if I thought otherwise. But the more and more that I see what goes on inside the classroom, the more I worry. Case in point: One of my better students came to see me during my office hours, in order to clarify some point or other. I manage to sort out her confusion, and we proceed on to other topics: how’s it going, any problems in your other classes — standard stuff. So she starts telling me about this other class she’s in, and how she can’t understand the professor at all, and I sit there and nod along thoughtfully like I’m supposed to, and out of the blue she asks the question: "What’s a trope?" |
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"A trope?" I say.
"Yeah, a trope," she replies. "The professor kept going saying something about the tropes inherent in the reading. What is that?" At that point I started to get a particular type of headache that I never got before I entered grad school. Those of you who are or have been in grad school will recognize it: that throbbing directly behind your right eyeball when you read an essay exam trying to convince you that, oh, for example, America went to war in World War I because the Kaiser was a Communist.3 Because I didn’t have an answer. Oh, yeah, I know, all of us hip, with-it, on-the-cusp-of-the-cutting-edge of postmodernism know exactly what a trope is.4 But your average freshman doesn’t. And I’ll bet diamonds to doughnuts that, deep down inside, most grad students don’t know what the hell a trope is, either. Let’s face facts here. An advanced liberal arts degree comes riddled with so much jargon as to render it nearly incomprehensible. If you don’t believe me, just sit in on a typical graduate seminar one day, especially if the professor’s one of these poststructuralist goo-goos. You won’t understand what he/she is saying, because half the time he/she’s using the types of foreign phrases5 that, wouldn’t you know it, never translate exactly into English; and the other half of the time he/she’s making nouns out of verbs or connecting suffixes onto adjectives that go together about as well as nitro and glycerin. It’s bad enough that we post-baccalaureates have to wade through this verbal compost heap, but inflicting it on undergrads has to fall under some prohibition of the Geneva Convention. Solution? Two words — Postmodern Bingo, or as I like to call it, Lingo®©™. Download the handy game card below, and turn those mind-deadening seminars into a little slice of Vegas. The rules are very simple: Pull out the card when the professor launches into his/her lecture. When he/she uses one of the words on the card, mark it off. Fill five across, down, or diagonally, and you win. (You can also play to win with four-corners, a cross, or — if the lecture gets particularly abstruse — cover-all-squares.)
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| L | I | N | G | O |
| agency | problematic | narrativize | truth-value | author-function |
| meme6 | discourse | referent | metacode | signifier |
| within-time-ness | emplotment |
FREE FRENCH SPACE7 |
paradigm | deep temporality8 |
| alembic9 | fictive | dialogic | trope | structuration |
| figurate | praxis | aporetic | formalist | text |
