Contexts And Conventions

[koganbot]

Didn't seem appropriate to bring this up on the comment thread to Mark's Steven Wells tribute, but one advantage my hallway-classroom formulation has over formulations that divide by type of person (Blots versus Swots) or by type of attitude (playfulness versus seriousness) is that hallway versus classroom describes two different behavioral contexts with two different behavioral conventions, albeit contexts/conventions that people internalize and then carry within them as expectations in regard to what's appropriate behavior in various circumstances. What's important to remember is that someone who has internalized the hallway-classroom split has internalized both sets of conventions.

This doesn't mean that someone will perform equally well in both environments, just that "hallway" and "classroom" don't describe different types of people or different temperaments. And of course there can be good reasons to analyze by type or class of person or by role or by temperament etc. But anyhow, I wonder what an analysis of the Sinker-Wells relationship that mentions the hallway-classroom split would reveal. I barely know anything about Wells, by the way.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

don't really disagree with this all all except to say that "swots versus blots" is more about "kinds of gangs you gravitate towards" than personality type per se (if you click through the cartoon, the first thing you're introduced to is the two gangs as collectives-of-talents)

and that the tricky part with a framework of dichotomised environments as explanatory metaphor comes when you're trying to describe a third distinct environment, such as a magazine -- which (for example) has an editor as its organising authority figure rather than a teacher, and is driven by somewhat different motivations (profit motive isn't totally absent from school-as-institution, even if not considered in school-as-metaphor: but it's central to the being of a magazine, which will cease to exist if it doesn't make money)