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I really enjoyed reading "Synecdoche and Surprise."  There were a few points at which, while reading the article for this class, I felt as though I was a teacher reading a student's assignment--a role reversal.  I'm not interested in grading this work, but I started thinking about the purpose of grading and who I am trying to satisfy when I write papers.  I always thought that I was writing for myself, but I feel as though when I am writing, I am always trying to explain myself to someone I consider more intelligent, more thoughtful, or more educated than me, someone I should consider an authority.  Perhaps this feeling of the professor as an authority on the subject they are teaching really takes away from the professor the opportunity to gain knowledge based upon what I have learned and thus, what I would like to communicate to them.

Thinking about the influence my writing could have on a professor, one part of the article that I found particularly interesting was when Dalke and McCormack realized how "[their] students' interventions repeatedly altered the terms around which [they] had strucutred [the] conversations" (Dalke and McCormack 3).  I think that the desire to change the way a course is structured based upon the needs of the students is something that can contribute to a more productive mode of education, perhaps even a Phase 5 curriculum.  I think that the structure of a syllabus is often too rigid and does not account for the shifts in student participation (as Julia noted in a class discussion that she thought that our class discussions were not as good when were discussing "Lifting Belly").  The purpose of the course then becomes learning what the professor thinks EVERYONE should know, but not necessarily what will be most productive for the class to learn.  When McIntosh explains how a Phase 5 curriculum would be "reconstructed to include us all" (McIntosh 20), it seems to me that perhaps the best way to do this would be to focus on the actual individual students in the couse and, instead of trying to meet the needs of "academia," attempt to satisfy those particular students you have at that moment.  I think that perhaps this is what Dalke and McCormack are attempting to acknowledge (or what they learned) through their experiment.  One class (set of students) does not represent the whole of all students and thus what helps one group to learn may not be successful for another.  Similarly, one set of student (and certainly one professor) cannot dictate what is important for EVERYONE to know: "the part, or representation, will never reflect or encompass the whole of an event" (Dalke and McCormack 9).  By structuring a course on what the students "should" know, the professor seems to be limiting what the students "can" know.  And also what the students already "know" and what they can teach their professor.  

Question for the authors:

You discuss Taleb's conception of "the human insistence on reducing the dimensions of complexity", explaining that this leads people "to make generalizatinos based on limited observations" (Dalke and McCormack 10).  I was wondering at what point you can conclude that the process of observation is over?  At what point are we"allowed" to draw conclusions?  When do we know when our observations have enough "weight," as Stegall discusses?  Is it always necessary to outline every step of the process in order to justify your conclusions?  And in doing so, who are we attempting to satisfy?