Moffett's "You, I, and It"

6 July 2011

The fact that this article was published in 1965 blows my mind. So much in the article sounded really new, progressive, and refreshing. Did this kind of thinking go out of style for a few decades? During our small group discussion, I was relieved to find the same sort of surprised faces on my neighbors.

I suppose my response, at this first reading, should to be to the two “abstractive progressions—one in which the speaker’s audience becomes more remote and diffused over time and space, and another in which the speaker’s subject becomes less and less matter and more and more idea.” This article is so deep and dense that I feel like a phony trying to do more than summarize and make sense of the four stages of discourse (inner verbalization, outer vocalization, correspondence, and formal writing) and of the four stages in the processing of raw phenomena (what is happening, what happened, what happens, and what will, may, or could happen).

However, this blog is about exploring, however sheepishly, and so I’m going to take a face plant into a couple fledgling thoughts I had in reaction to this article.

First: Chekov is a master at getting away from the chronological and the what happened. When I find a moment to sneak into to a Chekov short story, I am impressed over and over again by how able and willing he is to tell what happens and what could happen. How can I consider myself a Russian winter in the middle of an Idahoan summer? Easy! I can feel the shame, pain, hope, desire, and humiliation of his character despite the fact that, for example, I am not an awkward, young, male soldier whose only experience of affection occurred when a female stranger momentarily mistook him for her lover in a dark room and gave him a sigh-filled and eager kiss on the cheek.

How do I strive to write like that? How do I get my kids to strive to write like that?

Second: I am guilty of what Moffett described as “failures of teachers”—I ask my kids to compose constantly. And I often ask them to compose in response to either a prompt or idea I’ve presented (and, again, often that prompt is attached to a reading assignment!). Disgusting! Because it will take some time for what Moffett has presented to sink in, I look forward to marinating in the potential of the ideas presented in this article over the coming days and weeks. It will take time to wrap my head around this new perspective. I had many question marks annotated in the margins of the article—not representing confusion, but to remind myself that I want to think more about what Moffett is really saying and what that will look like in the classroom.

Feeling enlightened! Well, moreover, I’m feeling like enlightenment is just around the cloudy corner...