By Stanley Fish’s own admission, it was a “bad pedagogical idea.”
The controversial administrator and noted scholar, who just stepped down as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said he was meeting in his office with a student in his freshman writing class who was struggling to understand the grammatical relationship between subject, verb and object in a sentence.
Fish said they had been working on a sentence–“He threw the book”–and the student “still wasn’t getting the impact the verb has on the book.”
So Fish said he picked up a book and tossed it across the room. The book hit a bookcase with enough force to upend several volumes, including a history of the Bible.
“What I was trying to do was dramatize verbs having an impact,” Fish said. “It was a bad pedagogical idea. ,.. Rather than being enlightened, she was frightened.”
Fish said the unnerved student immediately sought–and was granted–permission to enroll in another section of the course. Fish wanted to blunt any notion that he had tossed the volume at the student.
“I couldn’t have thrown the book at her. She was sitting 2 inches away from me,” he said.
Nevertheless, Fish said in the future he will employ other pedagogical tools. “That technique is not any longer in my repertoire of teaching,” he said.
