Okay, I need some suggestions from you all on this poster. I feel like I've been working on it for so long that I can't quite look at it from an outsider's perspective. I want to make something that will help students understand logos, ethos, and pathos more effectively.
I'm not sure if the wording is strong enough, or if the examples I have given are helpful or not. I'm bugged that my lists aren't parallel, but, for example, if I write "cause-and-effect statements" instead of just "cause and effect" the poster layout gets ugly. Sheesh. I'm not completely sold on what my lists include (and exclude), either. Also, I'm not sure if the colors or the graphics are working as well as a different theme or color scheme would. The main title font has been impossible to choose. I sort of think that the overall display of the poster is amateurish, but I'm not sure what exactly is bugging me or how to approach revising it. Any and all comments will be immensely helpful.
Also, a huge thanks to Dr. Rice for helping me get the poster to this point. He helped me organize the layout to be readable and organized--my first draft looked pretty chaotic. However, I am a little worried about the red words (CHARACTER, REASON, EMOTION) overlapping the black headings (ETHOS, LOGOS, PATHOS) as much as they are. I'm afraid they won't be as eye-catching or as readable. But every time I try to mess with the titles, I just seem to be making things worse. My original poster had ETHOS, LOGOS, and PATHOS as a much bigger font than the above title, RHETORICAL APPEALS. I think the title probably should be bigger than the subtitles, but I'm worried that the subtitles are too drowned out now. Ugh, I just have to stop looking at it for a little bit. Thank you in advance for any and all suggestions you all have.
Dwight Atkinson's post-process theory article was excellent, and I particularly liked it when he said, "I have rarely encouraged self-discovery as the primary purpose of writing assignments; quite to the contrary, these assignments typically asked students to write 'about something'--some social issue or concern beyond their purely personal, individual lives" (1537). I'm interested in self-discovery in writing, and writing for therapeutic purposes. But I also believe that writing for the sake of composing yourself can be misleading, inauthentic, and egotistical. I am reminded of a woman I met in Louisville, Kentucky, a few years ago; she was an artist who displayed a new self-portrait every summer for tourists and art-lovers in a small studio downtown. Her only project for the entire year was to reconstruct a new image of herself; then, at the end of the year, she would begin to paint over it with a new construction of herself. It seemed.....pointless? Cocky? Strange? I had a sudden empathy for students who hate to freewrite for the sole purpose of bringing their subconscious to the forefront. Ultimately, who cares?
It made me think about the visiting Chinese scholars that came to our class on Thursday, and how their students were enthusiastic about studying different cultures. I wondered if my own students knew about American current events, let alone worldwide ones. I realized that self-discovery can come about best by what Atkinson proposes: writing "about something." What better way to invite the underlives and cultures of students to a classroom than by inviting them all collectively to step outside of their backgrounds and explore new territories?
I only lived in Japan for 15 months, but I did have the opportunity to move between the east coast and the west coast, to live in the city as well as the country. It was exciting to live not as a tourist in these different places, but as a Japanese person. I lived with Japanese girls, ate only Japanese food, and learned the Japanese language. I realized what it was to be an American by living someplace different. I remember when I finally came home, everyone seemed huge (huge bodies, huge voices, huge cars, huge purses and bags), and places like WalMart really creeped me out.
Thomas Friedman recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times called "Too Many Hamburgers" about how China, despite its governmental differences, has managed to work together and successfully create and implement great advances in their cities and economy. America, on the other hand, is quickly sliding away from whatever strengths we boast the democracy gives us. The article ended in patriotism and optimism, but with a strong warning that unless politicians spend more time working for the people and less time working to get their votes, we're screwed.
While I don't think that our students are incredibly dumber than students in China or Japan (it was apparent from some of the comments from our visiting scholars that Chinese college students slack off and disappoint their teachers just as much as our student do here), the multicultural influences these students have in other countries make them much more marketable and self-realized than the students who only know about their own hometowns. Bilingualism teaches a person more than just a second language.
I think our students need to be pushed to step outside of themselves more. I think every writing assignment should include research, even personal narratives. The syllabus that I am working on for this class is research heavy. I don't want students to be afraid of research--I want them to crave it. We need more curiosity and less pride. I'm grateful to be entering the field of composition during a paradigm of post-process theory.
I will resist from giving any plot spoilers, but everyone ought to go see Catfish. It's not a perfect documentary, but it is worth seeing. See A. O. Scott's New York Times film review if interested. What I will say is that the documentary reveals what kinds of perfectly convincing fake identities the average person can make on the internet. When I think about the online classroom, I question the authenticity of the student/teacher relationships as well as the final grades.
Dr. Rice related an interesting incident in class about a situation where an online classroom and a face-to-face classroom were both assessed by online graders, and that the online students resulted with better grades than the face-to-face classroom. I question this situation, and I admit that without further details, I can't determine my own conclusion about this circumstance. I question the teachers of the face-to-face classroom as well as the curriculum of the face-to-face classroom vs. the online course. My beef with online classrooms that I have experienced is that many (not all) online classrooms are designed to learn only specifically what they are going to be tested on (or graded for). I wonder if the face-to-face classroom from the story above had different strengths and weaknesses in their writing than the online students. Then again, perhaps it was only the online students who did their readings, since the readings WERE the class.
Perhaps I feel defensive because if online classrooms do end up being the better choice, there will be even less job opportunities for me tomorrow.
But ultimately, I can't get this film Catfish out of my mind. If online classrooms, online assignments, and online grading become the status quo, won't it be so much easier for students to have their friends or partners write everything up for them? Won't plagiarism be so much easier? How would anybody be able to ensure that what was posted was posted by the student getting credit for the assignment? Perhaps we haven't seen (or caught) much fraudulent behavior in online classrooms now, but if they became the status quo, I think we could be in trouble. Someone's mom who worries about her sons' successes may do all of their homework for them. Someone who learns a fellow student's password will find a new way to torment them by hacking into the victim's account and spouting embarrassing, offensive phrases into their essays. Friends will cheat for each other. Online friendships will be formed only to result in confusion when the 19-year-old boy ended up being an 80-year-old woman. I'm drifting into hyperbole, but the possibility remains.
I'm dubious that a face-to-face classroom is less effective.
It isn't that I hate technology, either, or that I don't know how to use it. I met my husband in person, but our courtship was almost entirely online--David was going to school in Athens, Ohio, and I was teaching in Rexburg, Idaho. We had Skype dates and sent emails every day. We talked on the phone and read each others' blogs. I understand the opportunities that the internet can bring.
However, even in our courtship, David and I were very careful. We made great sacrifices of time and money to take turns flying out to each other and remembering who we were in person. We realized how easy it was to appear different via the internet. We agreed, repeatedly, that our relationship wouldn't be fully realized until we lived in the same town. It is too easy to fill in the blanks for someone you never meet in person.
But perhaps it is okay to have blanks in student/teacher relationships. I'm dubious.
I DO understand the opportunities available for a classroom that is both online and face-to-face. I mentioned in an earlier blog that when I incorporated a class blog in my literature survey course, some students who had difficulty chiming into class discussions found it much easier to comment on the class blog. However, I question how our classroom blog would be different had the students not met each other twice a week in class or met up outside of class to watch films together.
I will say this: grading my students' participation on the blogs for that survey course was much more gratifying than grading these 1301 freshman students who have no faces. And I'm almost positive that my comments meant more to them than my comments here mean to the 1301 students.
I have to think about all these things for much longer. In the meantime, I am going to be haunted by the science fiction futures as portrayed in Surrogates, Blade Runner, Not Quite Human, and Alien. And I swear to all of you right now that if universities become solely online realms, I'm starting my own educational commune in the woods where we will study in log cabins and dance to banjo music around a fire at night. And then we'll see who's the most intelligent! Then we'll see who survives the zombie apocalypse!
Over Valentines Day weekend in 2008, I met up with my future husband (though we hardly knew it then) at the AWP Conference in Chicago (held at the same Hilton that Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones have their great shoot-up scenes in The Fugitive). I was a creative writer back then, but I was apparently already losing touch with the professional side of my inner poet because I skipped all but two of the panels and spent most of my time in the Chicago Art Museum across the street. I say I lost touch with the professional side of my inner poet, because all the authenticity of the fleshy parts of my inner poetness were drinking in more inspiration from the Chagall stained glass than had I ended up in panels from 9:00–5:00.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off is one of my favorite John Hughes films. I always feel like Hughes should have been a professor because his criticism of pedagogy is brilliant. Hughes seems to be an advocate for collaboration, voice, and finding the authentic audience. Ferris Bueller's high school is a hyperbolic example of everything inauthentic and dry in traditional education. There is no inquiry in the classroom, no real questions, no real discovery, and no real audience. Ferris and friends apply more critical thinking and reflection during their day off than they ever could have managed sitting in the stuffy classroom where even history seems like something that never could have happened outside of the midterm test. I like to think that my similar days off from an important conference were comparably inspirational (I did, after all, have enough wits about me to recognize good things in the man I stared at Hopper's "Nighthawks" with, enough to end up marrying him six months later to the day).
What I mean by all this is that when Bueller and the gang go to the Chicago Art Institute, with Dream Academy's cover of The Smiths' "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" playing through the montage, I am always struck by the profundity of their experience. "Please let me get what I want," indeed. This is a film about finding real experiences in a world of hypocritical, routine delusions of school, work, jobs, money, responsibility.
When Cameron stares at Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon" until the pointillism blurs into abstraction and he realizes the child staring out at him through the painting actually has no face, but rather a fleshy blank combination of pink and beige dots--well, it's a gorgeous scene, a scene he wouldn't have seen at his high school.
So what is it that made the Chicago Art Institute trip authentic? Why are the conversations between Bueller, Cameron, and Sloane mixed parts shallow and brave? Why are they authentic to each other, despite their great differences? I'm reminded me of another Hughes classic, The Breakfast Club, and the great discourse community created by the most stereotyped and iconic members of high school characters in a situation that never should have happened in their routine, regular worlds outside of Saturday morning detention.
Perhaps what I'm going for is a sense of spontaneity and chaos. Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of learning that you can't plan in advance. I have to think about this some more before I'll know what to say about it. But I think there must be a way to run a classroom that allows for a sense of chaos. I know there are essays in our composition text for 5060 that talks about this. If only I could have my own day off to read it right.
The most influential professor of my life is a woman named Sharon Morgan who works at a small university in southeastern Idaho and who doesn't have a PhD, but who did publish her memoirs at the start of her career. She is the head of the Writing Center, and I worked for her as an undergraduate. The job required that we enroll in a 2-credit writing seminar taught by Sister Morgan (it was a religious university we attended, where instead of specifying between Dr. and Prof., we were asked to refer to our teachers as Brother or Sister) that included lessons in both tutoring and composition. Our underlives were not only welcome, but demanded. Our knowledge of her underlife was another requirement. She taught personal essays before she taught anything else. Every semester (usually more than once), we would have a big barbecue at her house by a river, where she lives alone with a cat and a dog.
That class mattered. That job mattered. Sister Morgan was our mentor, our respected professor, and our friend. We rode her canoe in the river, we made birdhouses with her on her back porch, we had movie marathons, played cards, and did homework there on weekends. We cried over relationship breakups on her sofa, and we all read her memoir even though she told us not to bother with it.
My point is, we were safe to be goofy, and we were safe to be serious. We had a large notebook that we kept in the Writing Center where we could all leave entries and talk to each other even if we tutored on different days, different hours. Knowing each other was important. We read each others' writing, knew each others' interests. We gave each other criticism because we wanted success for each other. Being one of Sister Morgan's tutors meant giving a part of yourself to the cause.
I've worked at other Writing Centers to know that ours was unnaturally effective. Her tutors became better students in their other classes. Her enthusiasm for the writing process and for literature was not only admirable but addictive. Our work felt important. The students we tutored felt important. Writing was important.
After laughing hard while playing games and tossing frisbees, we would quiet down and talk about all the kinds of serious topics undergrads are supposed to talk about late at night with each other, and we would talk until well into the a.m. at this professor's home. These conversations always felt so important. So vital. So meaningful. We would go home with things we wanted to research, things we wanted to write about.
Yesterday's class was a little silly. My underlife of a GoogleChatter came to the forefront, and my fingers forgot I was in a graduate seminar. But that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking. That doesn't mean I wasn't learning from others. In fact, it reminded me of old times, when "collaborating" wasn't pointed out or scheduled in, but it just happened because I WANTED to hear what these people I loved had to say. I wanted their fingers in my brain/heart clay, and I wanted not a grade, but to BECOME someone educated, strong, and eloquent. Embrace the underlife, I say, in all it's multitudinous forms. Care about where your students are coming from, and don't let them mark you as a robot. What the hell is this all for if the only thing I want from my students is to make them do what I say? That's not why I'm in this gig.
Here's a couple of us painting Sister Morgan's walls after a Pre-Professional Writing Conference she encouraged us all to read essays at (which we did):
In Thursday's class, we discussed social-epistemic rhetoric inside the classroom, as well as inside the academic institution. It all comes down to communication and respect, I suppose. Students need to respect students and teachers, teachers need to respect students and fellow teachers, the administration needs to respect students and teachers, and students and teachers need to respect the administration. Unfortunately, we also need to stay on the defensive--after all, teachers give out the grades, students dish out the teacher evaluations, and the all-mighty administration makes the rules of everything from class size to tenure. We want to be civil, and we want to be kind, but we also want to watch our own backs.
Students hate group work when they are the ones doing all the work (or of there is that one student that seems to hold them back). Teachers get frustrated when students don't have enough respect to pay attention to instructions. I'm not sure about the administration, because I've never been an administrator, and, as far as I'm concerned, they are the Man. And nobody loves the Man.
The last English department I taught in, we used to say that the campus was like Narnia in the wintertime, and even the trees had eyes and ears. Teachers weren't safe to voice their opinions, and one bad student review could result in major consequences for even the most weathered professor. Teachers turned against other teachers, and divisions between departments made faculty meetings full of scowls and tightly folded arms. The crazy thing about it all was that these people were some of the finest people I had known as an undergraduate. It was astounding to see how quickly a tight-knit department could become prickly and offended as soon as the administration started suggesting that they knew more about how their classroom should look than the teachers themselves.
I've started to see how this can happen in our classes, too. As we've talk about ideologies in the classroom, I've started to realize how I have a tendency of not only pushing my own ideologies on my students, but I question their current ideology and suggest that I know more about how they should run their lives than they do.
For example, I think students should read. I think they are cheating themselves if they don't. I think students should know current events. I think students should take their homework seriously.
But there are different ways of expressing these ideas without making my students scowl and tightly fold their arms. I think social-epistemic rhetoric helps keep the band together, because it isn't silencing anyone's current worldviews or value hierarchies. Instead, it invites everyone to bring ideas to the table in a safe environment where everyone, including the teacher or the administration, agrees to think dialectically. Maybe it's okay if not everyone stays absolutely current on the daily news. In fact, David Quammen wrote an essay on Darwin and earthworms that suggests that it can be dangerous for everyone to be tuned in to the same news anchors, and that, perhaps, studying something seemingly unimportant could be just as ethical and rewarding.
I'm not sure how this all works, or how I'll implement it in this next Monday's class, but I do know that John needed to be nicer to Paul, Paul needed to be nicer to John, George needed to speak up a little more, and everyone could have listened to Ringo better. Nevertheless, the White Album still kicked ass.
When I was a student, I never cared much for group projects--unless my group was full of really awesome people. In other words, the best group projects were the ones where I knew the people in my class, and we knew the teacher well enough to know to what he or she would be impressed with. We knew our collective ethos, and we knew our audience.
I put my students into some kind of partner/group collaborative work every week we meet for class. It's the only way I can get them talking to each other since we only meet once a week for an hour and twenty minutes. I don't like that I don't know my students' names. For the first time since my very first semester teaching freshman composition in 2003, I don't know all of my students' names.
It's not necessarily the number, either. Working at my last university, I taught a 5-5-4 schedule: five three-credit classes winter semester, five three-credit classes summer semester, and four three-credit classes fall semester (the school ran on a trimester system, and we only had a one-and-a-half month break between summer and fall semesters). At one point, I had 125 students in four composition classes and a British literature survey course. I knew all of their names. I saw them more than once a week. I encouraged them to get to know each other outside of class by putting them in four-person groups, requiring peer reviews to take place outside of class in the location of their choice. I assessed them by reading their reflections on how the peer reviews went, as well as by skimming over their revision ideas prompted by questions I prepared to guide them through their peer review process.
One semester, I had a British Literature class of only twenty students. They were a little shy, save five or six talkers, and I worried that not everyone was getting enough discussion in during class. So we started a blog. It's a private blog, so I won't link to it here, but my image up top is an example of a post inspired by Swift's "A Lady's Dressing Room." Another great one I got later on was about "The Art of the Ancient Mariner." It included five images of art inspired by the Mariner over the decades. Besides via blogging, how else could a student have shared these images or even had the desire to look them up and share them with the class?
The blog was a riot. Multiple students emailed me after the course was over and thanked me for the opportunity to share their thoughts in that way. They said they struggled in class discussions, and this gave them an opportunity to think about the literature that they didn't get inside the classroom. The shy students found they could say much more via computers, and everyone loved added YouTube clips and pictures to their posts on Defoe, Dryden, Pope, and, later in the semester, the Romantics. We had great discussions online that prompted our discussions when we met for class later in the week (it was a Tuesday/Thursday class).
I had my students in three groups, with responsibilities to post on the blog rotating every three weeks. In one week, everyone from Group One would post reading responses to that week's reading, and then everyone (including Group One) would post three comments to whatever posts they wanted to (and they could post three times to the same post, too). What happened was that almost everyone posted MORE than three times, and some of the conversations grew long and interesting. Not every week was this effective, but it was about four hundred times more effective than the semesters I used discussion forums via Blackboard.
Blogging can be an excellent way to get students collaborating outside of class. But it helps to meet with students more than once a week, and it helps to know their names.
I don't feel like my classes right now can collaborate with each other because there is no incentive to know each other. Maybe for next semester I can figure out how to incorporate groups in my classes that meet outside of class. I'm just not sure I would know how to assess their participation in the 8 points allotted to me for instructor assignments outside the regular curriculum.
I thought it was interesting that Fulkerson placed Peter Elbow in the Rhetorical area of composition, since he is usually placed in the Expressivist corner. This made me consider where I overlap as a composition teacher and a writer. The fact is, I find all four corners important inside a classroom and within my own essays.
Formalism, though frequently given a bad name because it focuses on the outfit of an essay as opposed to the heart of the essay, is still a crucial part of any composition classroom. I also disagree that Formalism is the "science" of composition. To be honest, I don't feel that "science" is a correct opposition to "art." Jacob Bronowski in The Creative Mind argues that all art can become a science if the creativity is taken out, and likewise, all science can become an art as soon as creativity (such as when forming hypotheses) appears. The definitions become problematic. My point is, sentence structure, diction, and language devices can be incredibly artful, and important for establishing ethos. However, formalism comes after a student has discovered something to say. Grammar means nothing if the essay isn't saying anything.
Mimesis is also a crucial part of the composition classroom because it provides a context for the students. One needs to be a great reader in order to discover what needs to be written. A student needs to research in order to formulate their own educated opinions on their subjects. A student needs to be introduced to other people talking about their subject in order to join the conversation. Imitation is a crucial part of the artistic process of finding your own voice. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but once you know how the wheel works, it enables you to change the way the wheel is used or what it's made of.
Expressivism balances the potentially robotic Engfish that may result from mimesis. It isn't enough to read how others write--students need to find their own voices, too. However, expressing oneself is often easier after activities categorized under mimesis because students can learn about themselves by seeing not only who they are like, but who they are different from. It isn't enough just to learn how to imitate, however. Students need to learn to speak. They need to be able to create their own ideas and make their own connections, and to be able to phrase their words in a style that is theirs. Otherwise, they can never be true skeptics.
I would say that I learn more towards Rhetorical than any of the four, however. I think that's why I remember liking Peter Elbow from my earlier graduate studies; Elbow tries to work self-expression into a rhetorical situation where the audience is #1. For me, that's what composition boils down to: being able to reach your audience with something you want to say.
That said, my top four things are as follows (Note: this a rough, rough draft...not anything I would copy and paste into a teaching philosophy):
1. (Rhetorical)Audience is number one. Students must learn to imagine their audience members as they write. Ideally, they should write to a real audience and receive real feedback (oral presentations, sending letters to real recipients, online blogging or posting).
2. (Expressivist)Revision is the key to staying true to your own voice. Process counts, and it begins with free-writing. Internal critics need to be shut off, and students need to learn to explore in their writing, not being afraid to sound dumb, change their minds halfway through, or write a bunch of garbage before churning out some gems. The first few drafts will only partially say what they mean.
3. (Mimetic)Research is necessary for all types of writing. Even personal narratives should require some checking of facts or interviewing others involved in the story. Students need to learn that research isn't always as formal as they imagine, and they use research methods every time they look up a pizza menu online. Research should be as natural to their writing process and using spellcheck.
4. (Formalist)Style, diction, and grammar count. In order to speak what you feel, in order to reach your intended audience, and in order to join a conversation of outside authors, the form and functions of your essay need to be appropriate and correct. The art of writing exists in its form. Just as you wouldn't serve a piece of cake to someone on the lid of a garbage can, you wouldn't want to showcase your critical thinking under a smattering of comma splices and hanging modifiers. It shows respect to the audience, to yourself, and to your subject to clean it up. Even if you don't wear deodorant or shave your face or your legs in real life, you ought to at least make your writing respectable. You'll reach a greater audience that way.
Nothing puts me in a better mood than David Bowie dancing with muppets. This post is about me being in a better mood about composition from now on.
We've talked a lot in class about the paradigm shifts of composition: the introduction of the modes, "product" to "process," and Dr. Rice's suggested shift from a print-based society to a social-mediated society.
Well, I'm in the middle of a personal paradigm shift: I'm going to quit complaining. I've been looking at my classes through a lens of what I can't do because of restrictions of time, the number of the students, the curriculum, etc. I ought to be old enough to know that negativity will only hold me back from making connections between what we are reading and what I'm capable of applying in my courses. So, I'm switching out my former lens for something more optimistic, more realistic.
It's frustrating to read theory on the composition classroom and then to feel like my hands are tied behind my back. But they aren't, really. Most of the fathers of composition we've read about haven't had ideal classroom circumstances, either. So I'm dropping the pessimism.
I've been thinking about what my "Realistic" Philosophy of Teaching can include, particularly within the realm of optimism. I recently read, briefly, some criticism of Shaughnessy as being too focused on errors. One of my largest frustrations as a composition teacher over the years have been students who struggle with basic writing--students who couldn't tell the difference between a complete and an incomplete sentence. I can remember grading essays and not knowing where to start. I had seen essays where the grammar was distracting, but for some essays "distracting" was a huge understatement.
At the private school I taught at before Texas Tech, the remedial English courses were quickly filled and largely unknown to any students who weren't learning English as a second language. Thus, a good 10% of every composition course included students who really couldn't write a complete sentence. My heart broke when they came to my office asking for help, and we literally had to go through their essays sentence-by-sentence.
The book flap of Robert Weissberg's Bad Students Not Bad Schools seemed to suggest that Weissberg wants to try the opposite of "No Child Left Behind," and, instead, to let the bottom of the classes fall back so that the top students can move forward and be challenged. Um, I haven't read the book yet, of course, but I'm definitely intrigued. In any case, perhaps, at least for the next few/several years, we will probably be facing a generation of students who are frighteningly incapable of reading a book or writing above a fourth-grade vocabulary.
This isn't every student, of course, nor is it even the majority of students. But it might be the majority of students in freshman composition courses--those students who don't test out of freshman comp prior to college.
In my new paradigm of optimism, I am determined to feel hope for even these students who scrunch their faces up in confusion every time I say a word like "assess" (a word that a student wasn't sure of on my second day of classes here at Texas Tech). The first step is not to belittle students, like I did teaching in Southeastern Idaho two years ago when I had a student who had never heard of the word "blog" before.
I'm determined that the disparity between the smartest kids in the class and the students who need the most help is not an unbridgeable gap. And I think that the more multimedia we can manage to include in our classes is a good first step. Not every student may be on the same vocabulary level, and yet, most students will have seen at least one episode of Stephen Colbert. Students involve themselves in rhetorical situations daily, they just don't recognize it. They don't realize how much funnier Jon Stewart is when you can understand his rhetoric.
As I write this, my husband and I are watching a program on VH1 about the top 100 musical artists. I'm inspired by the rhetoric of the lyrics, the music videos, the rock star costumes. English 1301 is about this--communication and persuasion. As soon as my students understand that rhetoric is about solving the puzzles of communication and NOT about avoiding comma splices, well, maybe my students will have an attitudinal paradigm shift of their own.
Sorry this blog post is so jumbled--I'm still thinking this all through. But positivity, that's what I'm selling tonight. No more complaints from this cat, just scrappy problem-solving. Just like David Bowie, when I feel exasperated and fed up because all the little minions are shooting beans at chickens and not giving a damn about rhetorical analyses, I'll just get up and start dancing in tight, tight pants. The only hope for the future of composition programs is hope itself. And sweet rock star mullets.
This week's readings have me thinking about class time usage, particularly since this past Monday's class felt far too short to teach reading strategies, writing summaries strategies, and writing paraphrases strategies.
I don't wish to complain about only teaching class one day a week--I definitely need the time off to focus on my graduate courses--but this is the first time I've ever taught a 3-credit course for only an hour and twenty minutes a week. My students aren't getting the same lessons I'm used to teaching. While I'm a fan of cutting things down to their essences, stripping away extra words, time, and tasks, I feel like I don't have the time in class to promote the kind of conversations and activities that this week's readings have suggested.
There is no time to discuss freewriting and drafts. I have one day a week to come to class, tell them what they will be graded on this week, and push them into the deep end.
I'm used to teaching summaries as a series of 2-3 classes, giving me a chance to have them bring summary drafts to class, sharing them with each other, and learning how to polish their works.
This composition program pushes for product, not process. Even the assignment Draft 1.1 is misleading, because the students will be getting a grade for it as if it were a final draft, not a 1.1. Since there is no room for error or experimentation, I cannot reward my students for going out on a limb or for taking risks. Instead, I feel like I must prepare them for the typical graders' response to a product. We skip all the steps leading from invention to showcase and force them to be polished down to the sentence level for every assignment per week.
I think having one week to learn summaries and to write up a polished product is ample time. But not on only an hour's instruction. And not without discussing reading strategies and text annotation first.
I still don't know how my fellow teachers managed to cover reading strategies, summaries, paraphrases, plagiarism, and MLA documentation in an hour and twenty minutes.
I feel like the course is designed to require Engfish, because when graders (particularly when they have never met the students they are grading) look at assignment after assignment after assignment, sometimes Engfish can look rewarding because it sounds like someone who is "in the club"--someone who can walk the walk of academia. Someone who can look up a word like "mesodiplosis" and use it in a sentence to look legit, and, even though it may not be used particularly accurately, this student knows that dropping a word like that into an essay will get the graders' attention.
So, actually, I might be changing my mind...that definitely is something of an understanding of rhetoric and appealing to one's audience.
Still, rhetorical analyses don't exactly beg to be written by an authentic voice. Engfish will get our students by in this class just fine.
Kitzhaber discusses the long-running problem between college freshman composition professors and high school English teachers, and claims that BOTH types of classes generally have "confusion in purpose, content, and organization; inexpert teaching; poor textbooks." While I agree, I think that an enormous part of the problem has to do with the education that the young person received before college.
I've attached a film preview to a new documentary on the failing American school system. While I don't think that we should place the blame on the shoulders of high school teachers, I do think that students today are worse off than a century ago because of changes made to the way we teach composition.
I think that our nation's departure from literature and elocution has resulted in students who can't read, can't speak, and can't write. Programs have changed for kids to have fun in school so that they stay in school. High school teachers who have been through these newer systems cannot diagram sentences themselves, and many of them spend more time with young adult literature than with the type of literature required for students in college. Most students won't take AP English. Many of my former students have admitted that they passed high school and entered college without ever reading a book.
There are no Quintilians of the high school or middle school. Maybe we shouldn't have removed poetry from the modes of discourse (maybe we should stop being ashamed of the modes of discourse). Instead of approaching students with, "Listen, someday you're going to have write a cover letter, so pay attention!" we should be saying, "Listen, life is communication. Life is learning from other people and then being able to share your own syntheses of experience and insight. So pay attention."
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food talks about how we need to stop focusing on vitamins and fancy new diet plans (or Diet-anything) and go back to way our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. He says if your great-grandma wouldn't recognize that piece of food (e.g. Go-Gurt), don't eat it! Our cocky new scientific theories about WHAT is in a carrot that makes it good for us does not replace eating the carrot. Instead of taking vitamin C tablets, we should eat more oranges.
I think composition programs (starting BEFORE college) need to take this same advice. We need to look back. We can start in the universities by having better secondary education classes and elementary education programs. And we need to have better communication between the teachers of freshman composition and the English Department.
It's a shame that the same problems affecting the teaching of rhetoric haven't changed within the last century. If anything, the composition classroom seems to have declined in effectiveness over the years.
Before reading Horner's and Herrick's articles, I didn't know that the birth of teaching composition happened in Scotland (my Scottish ancestors' blood pulsed with pride for about 48 hours afterward). I loved thinking about the romantic start of these Dissenters' schools, with farm boys walking eighty miles across the rugged terrain to attend college. It was exciting to think of a country so abused and neglected by the glorious trade centers and majesty of the country just below them to suddenly become the academic center of the British Isles (maybe Europe? What were all the other countries' schools like?).
But I was really intrigued in class on Thursday when we talked about some people's theory that the modes of discourse actually get in the way of rhetoric.
I've been studying the history of print in my research/bibliography class; apparently there were many poets and writers who were a bit embarrassed and sad about having their words go into print because it lost the artistic presence of handwriting and all the flairs and aesthetic that went into the cursives of the day. Now, handwriting is used less and less--even notes are typed out on laptops in many high schools these days.
But print today is not the same as the print of yesterday, and I feel like if Dr. Rice is right about composition classes and writing becoming more and more a digital thing, I think rhetoric is going to have replace the traditional modes of discourse that Bain came up with. If students understand logos, ethos, and pathos, that is going to guide them in knowing what their future websites should look like, what fonts (perhaps their own created fonts?) should look like to serve their purpose, and what the OVERALL communication of their piece (not just the words themselves) is going to express to a chosen audience.
Right now, students don't "get" this. I disagree with Dr. Rice about PowerPoints being graded on the thinking that went into them. The whole point of comp. classes is to learn to communicate student's thinking to an audience and to have words go from one person's head into another's. If a PowerPoint's aesthetics get in the way of this rhetoric, the student shouldn't do as well as another student whose PowerPoint is more effective because of not just the ideas but the ethos and the pathos. I think teaching rhetoric is more important than teaching essay genres. Particularly in this globalizing world, where everyone's Facebook accounts and blogs can be Googled by future employers, potential stalkers, and neighbors whose kids their kids play with, rhetoric needs to be understood and practiced so that we can all communicate ourselves and our ideas in the right ways.
Final thing I have to say: I like the idea of the "smart mob," and it reminds me of an Alduous Huxley article I used to teach called "Propaganda Under a Dictatorship." Huxley coined the phrase "herd-poisoning" to describe groups of people who thought the way they were raised to think, without questioning or re-examining traditions or ideas. He used Nazi Germany as an example of an entire nation "poisoned" from Hitler's rhetoric. Mark Twain covers this ground in his essay "Corn-Pone Opinions," where he quotes a slave he once knew as saying a man gets his opinions the same place as he gets his corn pone. If we don't know how to think critically of ourselves and the groups we choose to identify ourselves with, our minds will be poisoned, brainwashed. I think Huxley would say it takes a group of skeptical, questioning intellectuals who form together to make "smart mobs."
I think we should rename the term "composition course" to "rhetoric course" and teach just that: not just the spitting out of words, but the ability to sift words in, question them, study the rhetoric of them, digest them, add to them, and send the created, synthesized words out in their own devised rhetoric in order to reach other ears and eyes. And in this age, we don't just communicate to each other in 5-page double-spaced essays. Which is why Dr. Rice is making us blog to each other instead of collecting reflections each week.
Composition, according to the dictionary application that came with my laptop is "the nature of something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up; the action of putting things together; formation or construction; a thing composed of various elements." To compose is to synthesize--it's to make meaning out of a series of events, ideas, observations, ingredients, pieces. The picture above is a slice of rainbow cake that my husband and I made last winter. The cake was composed of Betty Crocker cake mix, water, oil, eggs, cream cheese frosting (homemade) and enough food coloring to change the color of our urine (I'm joking). The different colors of cake batter had to be created separately and then carefully transitioned together for the final, delicious draft.
We compose music, outfits, gardens, DVD collection organization, Halloween candy categories; we compose our own characters, how we want to be seen and profiled; we compose love letters, hate notes, birthday party invites, wedding proposals, and apologies. Every day is a composition of compositions. We go to ladies' rooms to "compose ourselves," and we may have even commanded the person in hysterics to "Compose yourself, man!" Sometimes it's overwhelming to realize that we are just a draft of drafts. We may revise ourselves in such away that it will require a deleting of past compositions, habits and hobbies we have spent years going over and adding to. Going back to grad school is starting a new draft, and we find ourselves grasping at items from our past to relate to our present and help our pages not feel so suddenly blank. It's an anxious feeling. I feel like half of a haiku in the middle of one of those looooong pieces of white paper that we used to make old school banners on Print Shop with (you know what I'm talking about? With the tear-away side edges?).
Unfortunately, and ironically, freshman students find it difficult to understand essays as compositions. The temptation is to view essays as busy work, a horrible English class hoop they must jump through in order to be an accountant or an architect. Part of teaching composition is to teach the purpose for composing anything--it is to create something good to look at, something fresh and out of the ordinary, something they are proud of creating.
Jacob Bronowski's essay "The Creative Mind" talks about creation as an act of synthesis, and he argues that the sciences are just as creative as the arts in this respect. He writes, "No scientific theory is a collection of facts. It will not even do to call a theory true or false in the simple sense in which every fact is either so or not so. The Epicureans held that matter is made of atoms two thousand years ago and we are now tempted to say that their theory was true. But if we do so we confuse their notion of matter with our own. John Dalton in 1808 first saw the structure of matter as we do today, and what he took from the ancients was not their theory but something richer, their image: the atom. Much of what was in Dalton‘s mind was as vague as the Greek notion, and quite as mistaken. But he suddenly gave life to the new facts of chemistry and the ancient theory together, by fusing them to give what neither had: a coherent picture of how matter is linked and built up from different kinds of atoms. The act of fusion is the creative act." I would argue that composition is the ability to synthesize in this same way. The personal narrative is a fusing of experience with meaning; writing a research paper is fusing separate sources into a fresh thesis; writing a critique is fusing critical theories into a chosen article.
The trick of composition is keeping the fusions stable and cohesive, turning it into what you want it to look like, and making it look appetizing to the audience. And that's where rhetoric comes in. Or something. Am I still typing?
