What does Arnold Schwarzenegger have to do with perfectionism? I think we can all agree that Arnie is someone who reaches for the stars.
Then he starts his speech by saying: “Words without action is just poetry.” I want to ask: Just poetry, as in just Shakespeare? Just Sappho? Just T.S. Eliot? And just poets like those talented American ones, Frost, Cummings, Williams? The fact that Schwarzenegger is uttering these words during the speech he’s giving to open his “Think-tank” – the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the University of Southern California – should be sending shivers up the spine of anyone with even a limited capacity for self-reflection.
Here’s what he says: We know [this] about intelligence: One, it’s diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it.
We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.
Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
This literality is what exasperates me when I deal with students who believe that asking for an “Evaluation rubric” is one way to get a better grade.
These are the students who will say things like: “But I haven’t made a lot of grammatical errors, my essay is properly formatted in the MLA style, and I answered the question. Why did I get a 75?” They are usually indignant when uttering these words and this is when they demand a reckoning with the help of a rubric: they want a document that says: “Here are the ingredients for a literary analysis. Fulfill them and you will get a good grade.” They want back-up to prove they’ve done everything right and it’s my fault for not recognizing it.
These are the times when I try to explain that style – in my opinion – is something that happens when those different parts of the brain talk to one another; it’s what happens when a student uses more than linear and literal pathways to analyze a text.
In other words, good writing style is what happens when a student accepts that reducing his or her thinking to A = B = C is not going to produce a good essay.
It’s just going to produce an essay where one idea after another is expressed in a way that does not seem particularly coherent.
Sometimes showing them an example of good style is the only thing that works.
One of the reasons I like supervising the writing of essays is that I can be there when students are struggling.
I can tell them the chaos that comes before a breakthrough is a sign the creative process is at work and if they feel “All jumbled up” it’s probably a good thing.
They stubbornly hang onto that A = B = C way of seeing things and, counter to their own best interests, are just too anxious to have faith and let it go.
In their heads they are busy planning that trip to Mount Everest, or something like it, because they think a clearly defined goal like climbing the world’s highest peak – even when it means risking their lives – stands for something truly substantial.
In an analogous way, making that climb is far more important than, say, figuring out what Shakespeare really meant when he asked, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” However, I try to tell them they’re wrong and that poetry is important.
So it doesn’t help when people like Schwarzenegger – that former body-builder who is putting his name on a think-tank of all things – comes out with dismissive comments about poetry.
I’m going to end here with an exercise I give all my students.
What is one word that ties all of them together? This is an exercise in abstract thinking – the kind of thinking required to put together a meaningful literary analysis.
If you want to know what I’m doing in my classroom, this is it: I’m trying my darnedest to increase my students’ capacity to think abstractly.
