Keeping the Band Together

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.

Blogs and Collaborative Learning

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.

Four Things

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.

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.