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The student's presentation posed the question "Who has the right to create life, God or Science?" Her Power Point displayed images of Boris Karloff, a Petri dish, and an unattributed painting of Adam and Eve. Passages from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein floated onto the screen from one corner or the other, in bright colors, properly cited. Those lines illustrated the grotesque appearance of the monster and the horror with which he is met by strangers and villagers. One slide featured a short animation of a green Frankenstein Monster doing a jig to "The Monster Mash." It was by far the most entertaining and enthusiastically produced presentation of the semester. Her fellow students were dazzled not only by the colors, the movement, the lightheartedness, and the variety of her visuals, but also by the obvious care she had invested in her work. Her final slide showed a cartoon monster head surrounded by question marks as she opened the floor for questions. There were none. Her auditors had heard nothing that seemed incomplete or questionable, nothing they were not willing to swallow whole.
I was not as willing.
My more immediate concern was the simplistic, either-or, straw-man terms in which she posed her initial question. Was anyone questioning whether God had or was losing rights? Did readers of the novel and adults engaged in today's ethical issues need to take sides? Were there only two positions, both absolutes? Her bad faith question was simply a platform for her to voice an opinion - not to state a position based on research or thoughtful reading, but an opinion she'd walked into the semester with. Where I had looked for critical thinking, this very intelligent student had served up a sloganized dichotomy. She was on her way toward a most unremarkable paper, one I'd read many times before.
My second concern suggested a solution to the first. Students in that class - in that authence - were developing similar or conflicting arguments in their own work, yet no one had a word to say Hers was a passive, absorptive authence. They were a "cowed, credulous, hypnotized mass" in Bertolt Brecht 's description of the traditional theater authence (Brecht qtd. in Willett 1959, 170). While the presenting student might have been...