The Percy article relates to two concepts –  one we have been discussing in class and another that has always intrigued me. We have had a myriad of discussions on how observations can take on different meanings and relevance depending on the person performing the observation. Percy speaks of “the symbolic concept” (1), the frame through which we view objects. If we go into a classroom with preconceived notions of what we will see, we may miss something fantastic, something that may even shift our own perspective and startle us into discovering (or recovering) something new, something never seen or written about before. Percy uses the examples of Cardenas’s first glimpse of the Grand Canyon. The text written and the photographs taken of the Grand Canyon since discovery define to the viewer how the Canyon should look before they actually experience it for themselves. If the actual viewing doesn’t match these preconceived notions, they feel a sense of lack. Or maybe outright failure. The same sense of lack may manifest when viewing other cultures or playing tourist, or in our case, observing the classroom. Expectations dictated by the literature or our own ideology will rob the results of color and life and I think Percy may argue, a bit of ‘truth’. Percy seems to elaborate on the challenges of the ethnographer, the ones both Brueggemann and Sunstein faced. His article also reminds me of the point Ray makes about the fallacy of privileging the research from the professional researcher over the research from the person in the trenches, e.g. the teacher. As ethnographic researchers or those who simply experience the Grand Canyon, we must be careful to divorce ourselves from the expectations of the ‘experts’.  In this way, we discover anew.  

The other intriguing point about The Loss of Creature alludes to the role of education in our society. We do seem to be so concerned about how much content students learn, but less so about providing the tools that will allow them to think critically about the objects / text they encounter without the backdrop of thousands of years of study and parchment attached to it. Now, I know that the parchment holds value. It would not be effective to have to ‘relearn’ in a sense what ancestors have already figured out for us. However, it would be more effective if we worked more on closing what Percy calls “…the fatal gap between student’s learning and the student’s life” and use teaching methods that will not only allow that student to read Shakespeare Sonnet twenty years later and remember the first encounter with the poem, but also experience an unfamiliar Shakespeare sonnet without depending upon what some teacher said about Shakespeare in a high school English class.