Teacher to student: Correction.

Student to teacher: Fixed correction.

Student to student: “That’s good. Put in some quotes and some more research.”

Or:

Some institutional responses:

• Collect papers, mark them, return, get fixed responses.
• Meet one on one
• Peer review (provide checklist, ask students to locate items on checklist)
• Presentation (provide summary of work)

—-

Seminar response: Group discussion of one paper at a time.

Sommers’ response: Focusing attention (and specific acts like sabotage, etc).

Social response: Putting any given piece of writing in a relationship with other activities. This response may be close to Hartwell and Williams, and is close to Faigley. Hartwell’s whole critique is about teaching grammar (rules) in isolation of other writing moments.

One challenge posed by the readings: how to teach grammar not as an isolated response (fix, put it, add to), but as a social response.

To consider:

• Spaces of writing/writings about space
• Methods
• Certainty in claims
• Asking: “How was it done?” and “How can I do that?”

And to consider as well:

• Hermeneutical readings for this course (what do these readings mean?)
• Heuristic readings (what do these readings teach us to do?)

Thus, how do these readings show us four ways we can come up with teaching ideas and four ways students in our courses can write?

From Davis:

“a literacy which presumes that writers and readers are in the world and exposed to others, a literacy that can read and write writing as a function of this irreparable exposure” (122).

Exposure depending on the noise (that which does not add to understanding). Punctums. Details. Oddities.  The less than certain (where does this fit?).

A writing of exposure.  Not the predictable (Ray) reading. Not the certainty (Davis). For instance, exposure can be of place. The Eiffel Tower. Or,

Columbia, Missouri.

Or Missouri (or any place that might be local) as “not an I-dentity booster but an I-dentity buster, an exposure” (138). Identity as any kind of identity (personal or otherwise).

Plato Comes to Missouri.

1, 2, 3

part of larger iconic blog moments

Or in the name of practiced practicality:

A pedagogy: Dated Winter 2006

The text: Rats by Robert Sullivan.

The Assignment:

1. Project One:  Spatial Exploration (100 pts)
Go to a street IN DETROIT. Pick an object, thing, animal, sign, or something else related to that street that you notice.
Write a 3,000 word exploration of what you’ve chosen. Using Rats as a model for your work (the idea of “rats” is the “thing” the author notices in his work), your exploration should demonstrate awareness of:
History
Personal story (how/why you came there/what you did in your study)
Analysis  (what you understand/how you see this object in relationship to the street and/or Detroit)
Reference (what does this object refer to; its literal meanings - i.e. rats are animals) and its various figurative and allusion-driven meanings.

You may use narrative forms (story telling) or some other form. I encourage you to talk about your ideas either with me on a one on one basis, or with the class via the listserv.

Your project will include images and a complete Works Cited.

Overall, the mystory is a new media based writing that asks writers to consider the various areas of discourse that construct identity. Traditionally, we work in these areas in separate ways (I am formed by schooling practices; I am formed by family issues/moments, etc).

The mystory, drawing upon new media logics like pattern formation and juxtaposition, asks writers to compose with four areas of discourse at once. At the point of these areas’ (the popcycle) intersection, there is a moment of insight. An “ah-ha” experience. That insight drives the writing. The writing, therefore, is not argumentative - it does not “prove” anything - but instead is exploratory. The writing demonstrates the pattern (the insight). The one who benefits most from its composition is the writer, not the reader, for it offers the writer an insight not yet discovered.

The mystory, like the other three examples for this week, is still what we might call “academic.” Yet, it does something to “academic” that many, at first, won’t recognize. One challenge is to consider its usage of the personal. The same holds true for the other three weekly readings.

Or we can ask how a mystory, a writing on the bias, a generative ethos, and a merger of creative non-fiction with composition each draws on specific points, tactics, movements to create a piece of writing. One obvious “tactic” the essays ask us to teach is metaphor. Another might be the role of ethos (credibility, but also dwelling place). Others?

What the writers don’t seem to be interested in is personal writing for the sake of saying something about one’s self (i.e., “The time I went to camp,” “My favorite song,” “Why I Love My Mother”). Each essay complicates narrative, personal information, and how one’s story works across several social contexts (how it is informed by contexts or informs contexts).

A side note: “teletheory” - the term used by Ulmer in the intro to “Derrida at the Little Bighorn” is the name of the book this chapter is excerpted from. It is a prior theory Ulmer explores regarding the merger of video, theory, and pedagogy (when the book is written, video appears to be a major fixture in new media work). In later work, video is replaced by the Web.

Why does one write a mystory? To respond to a problem (whatever that may be) in a non-instrumental manner. It, like our other weekly readings, is a response to a dissatisfaction with instrumental approaches (pure analysis, thesis driven writing, modes of writing).

Problem solving, the mystory claims, is guided by experiences in other registers of life. Those experiences produce a re-occurring image. The re-occurring image offers insight instrumental thinking cannot provide.

The responses are to a an exigence: Why don’t instrumental thinking exercises  - compare/contrast, argument, personal narrative - produce sustained critical thinking gestures?  Here we get four responses that highlight personal writing in relationship to other registers of experience.  Mystory is one genre invented as response to the exigence.

The result of writing a mystory is not known until it is written, and it is meaningful only to the writer.

“If we perpetuate single visions, always see by a single vision, always judge by a single vision, then sooner or later we fall victim to arrogance, ignorance, dogma, rigidity” (Corder 15).

Multi-vision:

The Popcycle:

Ulmer’s Noon Star.

An example of having taught the mystory.

More Ulmer mystory.

The Bystory.

Lisa Coleman on teaching the mystory.

A student uses a weblog in order to produce a mystorical project.