Personal Paradigm Shift

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.

It Takes Time to Avoid Hooking Engfish

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.

'Nother Brick in the Wall

This is going to be a cynical post.

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.

Modes of Discourse vs. Rhetoric

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.