Box Logic

Boxes. I see lots of boxes. Are these actual boxes? Boxes full of stuff that means something to the person who put it in the box. Some of the boxes Sirc refers to are actual boxes. The boxes of collected items, or the puzzle-like box mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. But for the second half of the essay I'm not sure if he's referring to real or metaphorical boxes.
The assignments themselves don't ask students to construct literal boxes, so this leads me to define a box as simply something that houses several images, pieces, of writing, or items that are unconnected but have a theme running through them. It can be any theme. And then it is the reader's job to make their own meaning of what they have been presented with.
The 'box logic' seems best to be applied to specific assignments, like the kinds provided in the book. I can't see it as the basis for an entire course. Unless, by the end of the course, every piece of work a student has completed is put together in a box.
Then again, Sirc says he would rather "err on the side of [teaching] life" as opposed to whatever formula is needed to pass college requirements. Ideally, these two ideas would fall hand in hand, but in reality that doesn't always happen. What I'm still not sure of is how a box structure is any more like life than the linear formats we have gotten used to. Perhaps it's that life doesn't come at us in neat, linear forms. It comes in jumbles and chaos and it is up to us to make meaning out of it. Still, even as I begin to see how this could make sense, I can't help feeling like I'm missing something.