Names as Turbochargers

Ever since I started writing things that mattered to me, I have been really sensitive to what to call the thing I am writing. If it can be called something I like, particularly something that tickles my funny bone, I seem to work on it harder and make it a better product. I know that seems odd; it seems odd even to me, but there it is.

My dissertation was moving slowly in the right direction until I thought of calling it Undimensional Man. I played off of Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which was very popular on the U of O campus at the time, but it was a cosmetic reference rather than a substantial one. When I began to call it by that name, the whole project just exploded forward as if I had hit warp drive with my elbow.

The mix of policy skills I push in my public policy course fits the pattern, too. I try—unsuccessfully in many instances and you can trust me on that because I just graded the final exams—to point to the axis (A) of the positions under discussion first. The first question, in this approach is “What should we be arguing about?” I give pro-life/pro-choice as my example because “what should we argue about” in the ONLY factor that matters. No one is anti-life or anti-choice. Then I stress the positions (P) that fall on that axis, both those at the poles (the extreme positions) and those in the middle, either more moderate or more nebulous—sometimes it is hard to tell. Finally, I stress that each position has its own way of looking at the issue, its own way of deciding just what the problem (P) is.

That got me as far as APP (axis, position, problem) and just a little more thought got me to Killer APP, which helped me focus on it and helped me sell it to the public policy students, all of whom know a good deal more about killer apps than I do.

It was by that same logic that a collection of skills, the ones I want each of my American Government students to master before he starts on the course project, into six skills exactly and the assignment as the Six Pack. Late in this term, there were very efficient references by students to “the six pack skills,” which made me feel pretty good about the whole thing. I did see a 12 Pack at the Plaid Pantry the other day. Hmmmm, I wonder if there are more crucial skills than I thought.

I was finished entirely with a yearlong project of writing essays to my kids when it occurred to me what to call the essays. They came in four sections, of which the section of Theology came first, with the understanding that it would necessitate a section on Discipleship. My idea at the time was that theology naturally overflowed in the direction of a life of faithful practice, but I discovered that it doesn’t. At least in my life it doesn’t.

But before I wrote the Theology section, I had to write one on Epistemology so I could explain to the kids how I came to the positions I took. There was a good reason for doing that because I wanted them to see that the positions I wound up in were constrained by my ideas about how we go about knowing anything. I hoped that would help them understand that with their different views on knowing, they would naturally come to different theologies. And I had only begun on the Epistemology section before I saw clearly that there had to be a Biography section, explaining how I came to, and why I especially needed, those particular ideas about how we know things.

By the time I was done, I began to notice that I had a biography (B) section, an epistemology (E) section, a theology (T) section and a discipleship (D) section. That resolved itself almost immediately into DEBT and the essays into the DEBT essays. In fact, I taught a course in my church’s adult education program on this kind of communication and called it “The Debt We Owe.” I did not call it “the DEBT We Owe.” Too cute.

I got to thinking about the effect that “naming” has on me today when I was beginning to re-write some materials to use in my American Government class next fall. What would I find out about these kids if I could? I’d like to know if politics is salient for them at all. That’s important to me because making politics more salient is important in that course and it would be a help to know where I’m starting with them. I’d like to know how much knowledge they already have. I’d like to know if they have a beginning ideological commitment—liberal and conservative is about as far as we go at the 100 level—or maybe a fixed and useful ideology. I’d like to know how they feel about civic discourse. Is the slashing and burning of the talk shows what they are used to and something they approve of? Would they rather see a more accommodating civic discourse in which reasons are given and disagreements are accepted as part of the process?

I would likely have found a way to ask those questions sometime before next September, but this morning, I noticed that salience, knowledge, ideology and discourse get me to SKID and that the measures we use to determine those four elements will be SKID marks. Now I’m absolutely certain this project will get done, probably well before September.

I don’t know if “having the right name” for a project is a big deal for any of you. It’s getting clearer and clearer that it’s a big thing for me.