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.