While organizing (a type of cleaning up) files this evening--I find that anytime I clean, tidy, etc., I am constantly distracted by the need to "look into" that which I'm cleaning--I came across a brief paper I had written a couple of years ago. It had a really, really interesting quote on Remediation from Chapter I, Book II of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory about remediation:
It has been a prevalent custom (which daily gains ground more and more) for pupils to be sent to teachers of eloquence, to the Latin
teachers always, and to the Greeks sometimes, at a more advanced age than reason requires. Of this practice there are two causes: that the
rhetoricians, especially our own, have relinquished a part of their duties, and the grammarians have appropriated what does not belong to
them (qtd. in Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition ed., 1., 297).
Are we "teachers of eloquence" even if we aren't teachers? What does the "at a more advanced age than reason requires" seem to say about the students that must be sent for extra help? Have the real teachers, in Quintilian's framing, "rhetoricians," outsourced the teaching of "grammar"? I've read this several times since I wrote that paper, but memory has failed me. Sometimes revisiting memoria--through documents--is such a beneficially kairotic experience.
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Tim,
ReplyDeleteI find your post especially relevant after working with a lot of communications students today. Arguably, communications is the discipline that has everything to do with rhetoric, and many of these students are being told that they should come here and work on their grammar.
Also, most of the assignment sheets I have seen say "no poorly written paper will receive a grade higher than a 'c'," but how does one define a poorly written paper? Does that mean the rhetoric or the grammar? Is it our job or theirs?
I would argue that poor grammar hurts one's ethos, so that it has a lot to do with rhetoric, and maybe if the professors who send students to be remediated saw it that way, they would know that it was their job as well.