Cluck You

While growing up in the 80's, one of my favorite movies was Red Dawn. When HBO had it on high rotation, you could often find me in the dark of my grandparent’s basement comfortably sprawled, blanketed, and bepillowed on a seventies’ styled Brown on Beige checkered shag of a couch, eyes intently glued to a 13 inch color TV that Pap had rigged with cable. As the basement was adjacent to the garage, smells of oil, gasoline and grease permeated the atmosphere. I did not care (in fact, I came to love those smells). I had one thought and one thought only on my mind: WOLVERINES!

For those of you who have not had the great fortune to have experienced John Milius' opus, here is a brief synopsis (taken from IMDB):

"Red Dawn" envisions a mid-1980's America under siege from invading Russian and Cuban armies. Told at a boiling point of nuclear deterrence between the world's super powers, the threat focuses on a group of high school students who take refuge in the Rockies. First coping with survival and eventually fighting back guerrilla style, the students take the war to the invading armies in the hope that they can help turn the tide. As winter progresses; however, the group is worn down, physically, emotionally and mentally by war's attrition. As only a few remain, they must decide how to reach America's safe zones and see if tomorrow will bring another Red Dawn.

Without spoiling the ending I will say that as a kid, I missed the Cold War / Anti-Soviet propaganda pervasive throughout the film. Back then, I watched movies solely for entertainment value. Now however, I see Red Dawn as an opportunity for mental exercise. The question:

How would you react were the United States actually invaded and then occupied?

From the safety of home, it is easy to say you would react the same way the kids in Red Dawn did. But, experience has shown me that what we say and what we actually do are not always the same. And what if the occupying army was offering shelter, provisions, medical care and so on? Would that make it harder to resist? What if the ideology (if not the practice) of the occupying army matched your own?

While Steven Lynn’s “Den of Error” lacks the panache of a soviet-style communist invasion, the comparison (and subsequent mental exercise) is nonetheless useful. In a word, Lynn’s ultimate goal is to ‘liberate’ the student from “grammar-based pedagogy that generations of students have endured.” Says Lynn, “We’ll know that pedagogy has caught up with expert knowledge when the general public stops thinking that English teacher are grammar fussies, spotting errors wherever we go, clucking self-righteously.” Or, to translate, Lynn is seemingly proffering a giant ‘Cluck You’ to the status quo outmoded approach to writing pedagogy.

What I like about Lynn is his eagerness to embrace an all-of-the-above approach to writing pedagogy.  As if to suggest that the best way to 'liberate' students from the regime of pedagogies past requires use of all weapons in the arsenal.  But perhaps even more important than this is Lynn's attention to cultural issues in the classroom such as gender,race, and class. And instead of commenting on that portion through more writing, I thought I would get more mileage out of these two YouTube clips I put together back in November for a different class with Julie where I make comments analogous to those in this reading.

WOLVERINES!!!!


Code Shifting, Part I



Code Shifting, Part II