Loose Ends

Hi again, everyone. I was just looking back over my notes from recent weeks, and I decided I'd off-load some stray remainders from our discussions about grading, commenting, and grammar.
First of all, just for the record, a few sources to recommend: Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes. That title probably reveals why it's relevant to our discussion of a couple weeks back; Kohn argues that we're doing students no favors by providing what he deems to be artificial incentives. Also, a couple of the most influential short articles on commenting date back to 1982 with Nancy Sommers's "Responding to Student Writing" (College Composition and Communication, 33.2) and 1993 with Robert Connors's and Andrea Lunsford's "Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers" (CCC 44.2).

Sommers cautions us that "teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting." She later asserts that "our comments need to offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning." These snippets remind me of the question Michael raised a couple weeks ago about the extent to which we should expect our students to respond to our comments (and their peers' comments). On the one hand it's very important that they do so, but this can often lead to a "fix it" approach to subsequent versions rather than a "re-vision" (and I always write the word re-vision on the board in that way, and we talk about how the word is changed by the presence of that hyphen).

Thinking back to last week, I also really like a relatively recent article by Laura Micciche entitled "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar" (CCC 55.4). Aware that teaching grammar is "unquestionably unfashionable," Micciche proposes that we should seek to "establish grounds for teaching grammar rhetorically and for linking this pedagogical effort to larger goals of emancipatory teaching." I think many of your postings and comments about short, strategic discussions of particular grammar and usage issues were right on. In the past, depending on how my peer groups were set up, I've done something half-silly, half-serious (but ultimately very productive) called "Grammar Wars." After each major paper I would assemble a handout offering about a dozen examples (lifted directly from their papers) of sentences featuring various sorts of errors, need for certain types of clarity, etc., and I'd give point values to each one. I'd then pass these sheets out with the instruction that each peer group was responsible for turning in one sheet with amended sentences. Occasionally we'd talk about selected issues in class, but mostly we just kept standings throughout the semester to track which peer group was in first place. It actually made incorporating a bit of grammar and usage kind of fun (though it did admittedly create a fair bit of extra work on my part), and also helped to cement some camaraderie within the individual peer groups.

In any event, there are a lot of empirical studies and work by cognitive psychologists out there that suggest if given the choice between dealing with surface issues in student writing and going after their ideas, we should privilege the latter; the thinking is that once they chase down their ideas and start to articulate them more confidently, the grammar and usage issues will eventually sharpen on their own. What is assuredly deadly is what Micciche calls "'school grammar' and its focus on repetitive, decontextualized, drill-and-kill exercises."

Argument

How goes it for those of you who are just finishing your first week in the argument phase of the schedule? Any testimony from the trenches? Ballenger has some good lead material on this early in Chapter 8, but it's definitely worthwhile spending time discussing the connotations of "argument" with the class. Many students have the preconception that it's about pro & con, winning & losing, contentious verbal dispute, beating your audience into submission rhetorically, etc; all of this is not surprising given how this sensibility is hardwired into our culture: you know, the talking heads shouting at each other on TV, the soundbite mentality, shows with titles like "Hardball" and "Crossfire." Last year, in fact, to introduce the subject of argument, some of our TAs ended up using the transcript from the delightfully edgy confrontation between Jon Stewart and Tucker Carlson/Paul Begalia on "Crossfire." Stewart essentially accused the show of contributing to the coarsening of public/political discourse. It was a very issue-laden tirade, and one that would work nicely to get your students talking about argument.

Teaching argument also presents a nice opportunity to talk about the undoing of the 5-paragraph essay. Conducting an argument is all about using the best, the most persuasive means at hand to convince an audience that may not be inclined to agree with you, and the shape of the essay should respond to the demands of executing that argument (4 paragraphs? 9 paragraphs? 13 paragraphs? who knows). Ultimately, we not only have to teach students how to write a solid, arguable thesis statement (the first question I always ask my students at this point is "Is this thesis arguable? Could you expect that a fair number of your classmates in the room would disagree with your central claim?" If not, why write the paper?), but also how to support, how to imagine the appropriate interlocutors, how to sense and address potential counter-arguments, how to marshal other sources, etc.

Frank Cioffi wrote a nice book on argument recently called The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers. He writes that "the best argumentative writing expands and transforms the ideas of the writer.... It doesn't offer an easy answer or position.... One student told me writing in the argumentative mode was 'scary.' It's just not something they've been taught to do -- yet its being tantamount to an transgressive act can make it much more attractive." When Louis Menand, in a short New Yorker article from 2000, argues that the academic essay is "one of those skills in life that people are obliged to master in order to be excused from ever practicing them again," Cioffi responds with these thoughts: "But that's OK. I argue that the academic argument...forms the central and most important kind of nonfiction writing that you should master, even if you don't get a chance to use it after graduating from college. It's important not only because it draws on elements of all the other forms of nonfiction writing and hence will allow you to move to any of those forms relatively easily. It also replicates the method by which ideas are created. It teaches you to think."

My 5 for Your 5

Now for the posting I intended to offer (before my editorializing self got in the way). But perhaps the previous posting did till the soil for this one, which I suppose invokes my call for postings that are both serious and frivolous (sometimes simultaneously). Anyway, in the spirit of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, and harkening back to some of Kate's "get-to-know-you"s during the orientation week, and with an eye towards sensing your literary/aesthetic proclivities, would you be willing to share a list of, say, the "Top 5 literary works that you can't imagine proceeding through the rest of your life without"? (I'm now thinking of the title of one of U2's recent cds, "All that You Can't Leave Behind"? You get the idea). Or, if that's too intimidating, you can tweak the category any way you wish (Top 5 literary works that you get jazzed about, etc.). Annotations are optional! Here's what I might offer (at least at this particular moment):

• To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf: a positively luminous novel, filled with sentences to marvel at, similes to die for, and emotional richness that comes up differently for me every time. The one novel (and perhaps the one writer) I could least afford to do without.
  
• The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje: blend a poet with a novelist, mix in some post-War and postmodern uncertainty, and get something magical like this.
• "The Dead," James Joyce: so exquisitely rendered, and so devastatingly understated until that stunningly musical coda. A wonderfully teachable story, too.
• Omeros, Derek Walcott: in my opinion, the most magisterial and stunning feat of poetic inspiration I've ever encountered. A 7,000 line epic poem may not be for everyone, but yet it has it all: it's technically dazzling, thematically intense, and just plain fun.
• Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie: another remarkably capacious imaginative work, and a page turner to boot. It quite possibly deserves its designation by some as the most important novel of the past fifty years.
  

Well, I guess that's my five, but I'm also a sucker for a good Victorian novel once in awhile (especially Thomas Hardy, who has such great titles, too, like Far From the Madding Crowd) ... and I could surely make a case for including The Lord of the Rings in my list of 5 ... and then there are all the poems I might have mentioned (at this particular moment in our annual earthly voyage, I'm reminded that Keats's "To Autumn" means as much to me as almost any other work of literature). If you don't leave me hanging, maybe in subsequent weeks we'll need to move on to music and movies!

To Blog or ... Yes, To Blog

Greetings everyone, from the anchorage of a mid-day, beautiful Saturday afternoon (though, I must admit, it's not the most secure of anchorages when you're on the relentless M-W-F teaching schedule; grading and class preps create a sense of urgency, even prior to what I hope will be a red wine-informed Saturday evening!). I did want to tell you all that we appreciated your thoughts on the role of the blog, aired 0ff-blog in your letters composed during last week's 540. As a writer and as an erstwhile scholar, I love the sense of emergence -- and especially the possibility of dialogue and workshopping -- offered by writing for the blog. I think eventually this will translate into pedagogical value, although I must admit my first couple of experiments with blogs in my literature courses have been marked by mixed results (if you're interested, you can see the blog-in-progress for my Multicultural British Literature class, or my blog last semester for my Literature and Music class; you'll encounter some positively terrific student articulations, but mostly you'll notice a lot of "Eric"s littered all over the place); they've helped me as a teacher and as someone interested in mining ideas that are only half-explored in class and in our reading, but I've not yet found the magical formula that will lead students towards moving my "voice" more into the background. It may be just a matter of waiting for students to get more familiar and comfortable with blogs. It may be that an even better technology awaits us around the corner. It may be that I need to lead them (force them?) there early in the semester, and then back off and hope the whole enterprise will grow. I don't know.

One thing I think I've realized is that there is a tricky line to negotiate between assigning blogging participation and letting the blog assume its own life and dynamism organically. The latter approach is both more desirable and more consistent with the spirit of the genre as it has developed over the past couple of years (especially in its main guise as a kind of public webbed journal), but it also means leaving our little creations (and teaching objectives) vulnerable to a kind of digital Darwinism. As for our Comp blog, I must say that I think your postings have in fact not been repetitive or mechanical in any sense; rather, they've been terrifically engaged, and have left this participant feeling that the 540 discussions have been enriched and almost overstocked with possible ideas to pursue and discuss. I wonder what kind of reading response in writing would not seem like something one did simply because "it has to be done." And this way we get an instant archive of teaching ideas and testimony as an added bonus.

But this a discussion to be continued; certainly we'll want to manage and nourish this blog in such a way that it makes you want to stop by and visit it from time to time, even daily, and makes you want to leave behind a few words of your own -- whether they be serious, exploratory, playful, frivolous, etc. Many of the Digital Writing Classroom teachers among us are using a reading from Ray Oldenburg's wonderful book The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Done right (I almost just typed "done write," which, of course, would also have been appropriate!), and with your continuing feedback, maybe our little blog can claim a place in Oldenburg's unwieldy but seductive title!

Faith on (and in) Comp

A friend of mine passed along the link to this short testimonial, "Confessions of a Comp Enthusiast," from one of your colleagues at another institution. Thought you might enjoy it ...

Conversation starter story: Tell me why I don't like Mondays

It’s mid-day on a Monday at the University of Montana, and the digital classroom is hot as a tin can in the desert sun. The e-machines, all 25 of them, hum like bees. You’d been out until well after midnight the night before, celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Old Post, and your mouth feels like you’ve eaten an entire jar of peanut butter without the help of bread, jam or milk. As you look at the students arrayed around you in an arc, you remember why you had promised yourself you would never, ever go out the night before you taught. You glance into the corner where Jimmy, against your expressed orders, checks his e-mail on computer #17. Sigh.

Although it’s still early in the semester, you’re already frustrated with this fresh crop of ENEX 101 writers you’ve been trying to incite into action. Despite setting a goal for each class, and providing students with plenty of “raw material”, and trying every one of the six strategies recommended in Margaret Lyday’s “Facilitating Class Discussion” essay, you can’t get these freshmen to open up. Class discussion has ground to a halt, if it ever really began, and you’ve become a talking head lecturing to a Stonehenge-like ring of statues.

It’s difficult to say what the problem is. Susan, her black-rimmed glasses set off against her pale face, looks as scared as a deer caught in the headlights of a tractor trailer truck doing 90. She hasn’t said a single word in 600 minutes of classroom instruction. Paul seems just plain shy, despite the fact his hulking, All-American physique dominates the classroom like a bad smell; when you call on him by name, he just shrugs his massive shoulders and says, “I dunno.” And Nadia, well, she sinks down so far in her chair you wonder why she doesn’t slide off when her head begins to nod and the low, sonorous hint of a snore descends from her face like a waterfall. It could just be the heat, which lies like a wool blanket over the entire room.

No, it hasn’t been a banner start to the semester. Once, during the ethnography inquiry, it was clear that not a single student had even read Soljas, never mind prepared a 250-word thought piece that would prepare them for the discussion. When you asked them what kind of honor was involved in dying in a gun battle on the seedy streets of inner city New Orleans (ironically inundated, you noted to yourself, by a flood of biblical proportions), no one uttered a peep after a full three minutes of silence. Finally, Julio blurted: “The Hollywood kind?”

Apart from Keener Kathy and Shallow Hal, who regularly offers his opinions on the weekly reading despite the fact it’s clear he hasn’t read it, the only student who has anything regular to say is Mighty Mouth Mike, who is always rapping with his neighbour or poking fun at Keener Kathy for speaking up. Look, there he is now, rolling his eyes and pointing at Lloyd, an engineering student, while he tells Jackie, no doubt, how he tripped Lloyd in the hall before class (which you saw).

You desperately want to engage them in a more active mode of learning, so they can apply concepts to different contexts and analyze and evaluate new results. So they can learn to WRITE, dammit. But you’re at your wit’s end. Why do these students refuse to open up and participate in a class discussion? What additional strategies might you employ to encourage them to prepare for class and to actively participate in discussions? And to what degree are you, as a teacher, obligated to ensure your students come prepared and participate?

You must find answers. Your sanity depends on it.