No reading assignment for Thursday
Lab Updates:
– Frames, Forks and Wheels: Painting the frames, attached springs to the seat of the motorcycle, Continued to sand the nacelle.
– Bottom end: cleaned parts, checked the crankshaft, checked to see if fly wheel was assembled correctly.
– Electrical: Finding and organizing missing parts.
– Top end: finished the uploading pictures to website
– Lesson: Make sure you clean up!
In Class Discussion:
Zen and Art ch. 16
– Mountains of spirit à metaphor for people being able to pick their way.
– Discussing Quality and how the narrator is trying to piece together from Phaedrus past teaching notes but he can only come up with aspects of quality not an actual definition.
– Phases of Quality:
- o First phase had an idea but didn’t think about it that much.
- o Second phase: systematic rigid statements of what quality is.
– Imitation: Schools teach you to imitate. Prescription to do well in many courses.
- o This is how you get ahead but he also argues to go beyond that.
- o Pushing his students to write about original ideas. Ex. The girl who wrote about the individual opera bricks.
– Absence of grades/marks: Experiment on his class.
- o Upset a lot of students because didn’t have a tangible goal of where they were in the class. But it improved the participation within the class and made the students more engaged in the material
- o Wants the point of school to be about learning not just about the marks. Grade motivated vs. knowledge motivated
– Classes interpretations of a no grading system:
- o Author is telling a story to make a point. Much more complicated about why people are in school such as for arts, drama, etc.
- o His example is one-dimensional. People go to school and end up doing stuff in life that is unrelated to their degree.
- o You can learn what you don’t want to do at university
- o If you don’t care in school about actually learning you want care about your job
- o Mule vs. the freeman
- o Who’s to blame people for living a simple life, to provide food for their family etc.
– He goes back to the idea of withholding grades didn’t have scientific value because he couldn’t control all the variables. It was unclear what it showed you.
– If grades were removed the class is forced to wonder what it is really learning. (pg. 200)
- What is our goal?
- o To build a motorcycle, to restore it
- o Restore it so it reaches a certain level of quality. It should look nice and it should run well
- o Is it ok to use replacement parts? Or should we be true to the original design?
Ch. 17
– Narrator and Chris climbing mountain
– Narrator wants a definition of quality. Asks his class.
- o Wants his students to contest him with a definition but they never do.
- o He tricks them into believing that they do know what quality is. Ex. the essays and which had more quality.
- o tricks them to the point where they don’t have to question what quality is anymore
– Defines quality as aspects of quality.
- o Unity, if you want unity have an outline
- o Authority of an argument use footnotes.
- o Economy means enough to make your case but not too much to bore your reader. Less is more.
– What makes Chris’s way of climbing inferior. Don’t climb the mountain just to prove how big you’re. To him the quality exists along the trail not at the top. It’s an internal thing.
Hilary Lloyd