I heard a rumor recently that Mizzou frowns upon the end-comment because it can get you in trouble. Note that I prefaced this tidbit of information with its status as “rumor.” Despite the fact that I do not know if this rumor has any truth, it does have me doing some thinking about my own methods of grading. I always comment. I mark the paper up a few times on each page, I ask questions, and I leave a gargantuan paragraph at the end of the paper that starts with something the student has done well, and ends with an area that the student needs to improve upon.

With regard to my own papers, I have always found end-comments extremely helpful to my revision process. Frankly, it is the end-comment that often ends up being the impetus for my revision. Small details in the margin don’t necessarily address the top-tier issues that could inhibit flow, meaning, etc. Because I take these comments to heart, and work with them in my own writing, I feel a strong urge to offer them to my students. I wonder what could be the harm in them. I see only their potential helpfulness. Or at least I have always (up until this moment) seen them as largely positive.

But I do wonder now if there is a small chance that these comments are some form of bailout (see how I so subtly stuck something about the economy in this post?). Should students be able to look over their own paper and know how to fix it without my comments? Where does personal responsibility enter the writing classroom? End-comments do offer up the ideological idea of an A that solely rests upon fixing what the teacher says simply because the teacher said it. Is this simply reinforcing the negative power dynamic that we have been discussing? Is this the banking method in disguise?

This week provided opportunity for my confusion about how to grab the attention of my English 1000 students. On Monday, no one seemed interested in the subject matter, and very few people had anything to say about the argument of the articles we read (although everyone had their own personal opinion about fast food). It was hard to keep them on track and motivate them to “think critically.”

Fast forward to Wednesday. I took a cue from our 8010 class and facilitated a group exercise which entailed discussing the argument of 2 articles and then discussing personal reactions afterwards. They were animated. They paid careful attention to the texts. They gave eloquent summaries. They came up with their own complex comparisons/contrasts. They connected the personal to larger issues. They questioned the relationship between individual/society. It was more than I expected. In fact, they exceeded my expectations and we met every goal for the day.

Was the lack of effort on Monday simply attributable to Monday? How do we, as teachers, harness those seemingly intangible (yet essential) motivational differences and make sure that we incorporate them into our everyday? Is it really just as simple as letting them do group work?

I actually rented a few books from the library about teaching college classes, and am going to post some interesting notes about motivation from one particular text entitled McKeachie’s Teaching Tips.

1.In planning assignments, consider issues of choice and control.

2. Foster mastery by encouraging students to revise their writing.

3. Adopt a criterion-referenced approach to grading rather than a normative one.

4. Test frequently enough that students become accustomed to the format and have opportunities to learn from their mistakes; at the very least, consider a similar format for the midterm and final.

5. When grading tests, create a frequeny distribution of responses and consider dropping questions missed by a large number of students–and then reteach the material after you return the test.

6. Consider scheduling two test taking periods for each test, with immediate feedback after the first test and two or three days to study before  the next one (an alternative version), and award students the higher of the two grades.

7. Provide feedback to students that is constructive, noncontrolling (for instance avoid words like should), and informative, thus enhancing student desire to improve and continue to learn.

8. Learn more about the motivation of your particular students.

9. Project your own motivation–for the subject matter and for the students.

10. In your supervision of teaching assignments, make the motivational implications of your instruction decisions explicit.

1. Duh.

2. I feel cheated.

I feel like I’m really behind on my blog entries, even though I just posted one the other day. I’m still trying to work on that whole time management thing we keep talking about–how does one juggle four classes and two teaching gigs successfully? Seriously, any suggestions would be welcome.

I also wanted to post something quickly about the semester long assignment we discussed at the end of class on Tuesday. I’m really interested in this concept, and am thinking about it during my limited free time. I am showing Super Size Me in my classes this semester, and we are reading a few excerpts from Omnivore’s Dilemma and a few essays by Chuck Klausterman as possible lenses (or at least the chance to experiment with intertextuality). I’ve done this once before (Oh yes, I rebelled against the standardized syllabus once my friends!), but always as a boxed project that only lasted for a few weeks before we moved on to something else. I’m going to ponder how I could make the viewing of this film, and any accompanying readings, a semester long project.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/V168xofxgu0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to leave me a comment.

“What Difference a Definition Makes!”

I found this week’s reading quite challenging, and I’m not afraid to admit that I turned to the dictionary quite a few times in order to familiarize myself with the definitions that circulate in rhetorical discourse. I’m including the definitions, which I shamelessly stole from dictionary.com for your viewing pleasure.

Epideictic-designed primarily for rhetorical display

Antilogy-a contraction in terms of ideas

Hermeneutic-interpretative/explanatory

Syllogism-deductive reasoning “All A is C; All B is A; Therefore, all B is C”

Suasory-act of advising, urging, or attempting to persuade

Oneiric-of or pertaining to dreams

“The students are memorizing speeches to perform the, and performing them to learn to inhabit them, and to be inhabited by them, on the way to acquiring a “feel” for discursive art–what it feels like to be Demosthenes, or Lysias, or Thucydides speaking–so that the rules of rhetoric, when they are discussed, will have something to elucidate and will be meaningful” (Walker page).

I’m intrigued by the ways in which we might connect Walker’s discussion of performance to Barthe’s concept of perception. Or rather, if there is any usefulness (or perhaps the key point is that there isn’t any usefulness) in comparing them. It seems like performance and perspective are synonymous here. That is, they both function as gateways, or bridges to the dual (and rhetorically essential) processes of absorbing social meaning, and creating individual meaning.

“The tower (and this is one of its mythic powers) transgresses this separation, this habitual divorce of seeing and being seen, it achieves a sovereign circulation between the two functions; it is a complete object which has, if one may so so, both sexes of sight. This radiant position in the order of perception gives it a prodigious propensity to meaning: the Tower attracts meaning, the way a lighting rod attracts thunderbolts; for all lovers of signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of pure signifier, i.e., of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed….” (Barthes’ page).

I intend to write more as I wrestle with the complexities of these articles (and frankly as I regain enough brain power to try and understand them better).

One of the readings we discussed in my English 1000 course today contained the following quote about the necessity for teachers to engage their classroom by “talking with students about what they could learn and what they are learning about their own interests, values, and sense of person and place as well as what they are learning about the subject matter in question” (Langeman 145).

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about our recent conversations in pedagogy, and this idea of sort of gearing assignments toward the personal (with the intention that it can be expanded upon and connected to larger public/global issues).  I’m wondering how other people take this next step though–as I seem to encounter stagnation when I try to help my students with this transition. They always have something to offer about their feelings/values/viewpoints, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with our reading for the day, or understanding the construction of another author’s argument, etc.

 And I wonder if we are doing a disservice when we ask them to engage the personal so often, when in reality they won’t be able to do this in many other arenas of their life–whether in academia or the job market.

 Which brings me to something else that we discussed in class last time. When Jeff mentioned that we shouldn’t think about other classes and whether we are meeting their expectations–because quite rightly–they don’t think about us or our expectations–I was elated. It felt liberating. I’ve always felt this intense pressure to ”cover it all” because at my old school composition was a preparatory course. 

 This elation lasted until I went home and re-read some of the small responses my students had written about how they hoped English would prepare them to be better writers/readers/communicators in other courses, or the job market, or just in life in general. I think I’m confused about our role as composition teachers. Isn’t composition (not literature or creative writing) a gateway course? Isn’t that why it is required? How do we balance the expectations that the rest of the university has for us (don’t some view composition as the course to prepare students?) with this idea that what happens in our class need only be relevant to our class. Or, am I missing the point? (this could be the case as I’m dreadfully sick and foggy-brained)

I find all of our discussions thought provoking, but I also find myself losing touch with my purpose as a composition teacher.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a)finding my place and b) turning a personal assignment into something larger?

Brodkey’s discussion of the process of internalization (and regurgitation) has me thinking about my theory readings for this week, which include passages from Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. At the risk of completely detaching myself from the global call to action that I think is at the heart of Brodkey’s literacy narrative, I can’t help obsessing over the trans-historical connections between class struggle and knowledge/power and reading/writing.

Brodkey acknowledges “that the ostensible autonomy of middle-class professionals depends on children internalizing the rules that regulate reading (and writing) seems obvious to me. Less obvious, however, is what part reading and writing practices learned at home, and at variance with those learned at school, continue to play in my intellectual life” (12). Further, she describes how “writing is only incidental in this cycle. It is incidental because the cycle deflates the value of the intellectual work of practices like writing in order to artificially inflate the value of ritualized performances (achievement tests, reading scores) that can be calculated and minted as cultural currency” (22).

Althusser wonders how many teachers “do not even begin to suspect the “work” the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as “natural,” indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was “natural”, indispensable and generous for our ancestors centuries ago” (1495).

Each week, I’m struggling with this idea of the “System” and what exactly our role/responsibility as comp teachers is. The stakes are huge! The system “is crushing” me. Is the point simply that we should follow the three r’s? Revamp, Revive, Revise? Is there a necessity for a compositional revolution?

New Topic

In her blog this week, Kate discusses authorship and the separation (dare I bring up death?) of author and text. She asks, “Was I unusual in my familiarity with the concept of authorship when I was young, or did you all think about this, too?” I am envious of her memory of the intense connection to her favorite childhood authors–a connection that I didn’t form until I was in 6th grade and read a series of books by V.C. Andrews. Yes, I too followed dark stairways into the adult library (and probably someone should have stopped me–have you read anything by V.C.? Quite disturbing for a sixth-grader! If it helps, she wrote Flowers in the Attic). It was then I learned about authorship, and began to contemplate (and question) ownership of texts (V.C. died in 1986 (before I even began reading her books, but she is miraculously still publishing books today–oh the complexities of ghostwritership!)

Before V.C. and her troubled tales, I had no understanding of authorship. This may be why Brodkey’s discussion of the rupture between author and text struck home, as I too learned to read with the same detachment. I’m currently wondering what this detachment means, or if it has influenced my writing/reading in ways that call out for similar exploration.

Fiction: Caballero by Jovita Gonzalez

This is a text written in the 1920’s and 30’s that explores the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico in the period directly before the Mexican-American War (1846-48). It exposes the myriad and complex relationships between gender, race, nationality, and sexuality as they interacted at the liminal space of the border (or the borderlands). I’m fascinated by its take on femininity and its discussion of cultural and national politics of gender.

Music: Depeche Mode (Fast Fashion)

Depeche Mode grew out of the New Romantic movement that combined fashion and music. As a band, and as individual members, they consciously (and of course unconsciously) played with contemporary gender ideologies. They embraced androgynous clothing, sang counter-sexual songs, and exposed a liminal space in the music/fashion world where transgression could lead to a very provocative power.

Ethnicity: American (French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Welsh, English, Irish…)

I’m not sure what to say about my ethnicity. Maybe it’s the reason that I’m drawn to other cultures, specifically those that have had complex relationships with America (as Empire/even Colonial power?) like Mexico and England.

Discipline: I was accepted into the program as an 18th/19th Century Americanist, dealing specifically with Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Seduction novels from this period. My MA thesis was on Border Romances of the Southwest from the early 20th Century, and took up the same issues in a different context.

My Story shows, not surprisingly, that I’m drawn to issues of gender and sexuality, nationality and power, ideology and transgression. It’s interesting to discover that my discipline has influenced (and so greatly) the rest of my life. I often wonder what consequences anything I do in my critical thinking/writing has on the rest of the world. I guess this shows that it has great consequence on My World/My Story.

This post will be a work in progress, but I wanted to throw out some quotes from the Fish reading for 8005 that I’m pondering this morning. I intend to return to them after I read Moby Dick, grade response papers, attend my 3 classes for the day, and do my journal entry for theory.

“All composition courses should teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. No composition course should have a theme, especially not one the instructor is interested in. Ideas should be introduced not for their own sake, but for the sake of the syntactical and rhetorical points they help illustrate, and once they serve this purpose, they should be sent away. Content should be avoided like the plague it is, except for the deep and inexhaustible content that will reveal itself once the dynamics of language are regarded not as secondary, mechanical aids on thought, but as thought itself” (44-45).

I think this is a wonderful description of an ideal composition classroom. However, I’m not sure that an intro comp course can provide this comprehensiveness. I certainly wonder if I would even be capable of implementing this in my courses at this point. My students often start with ideas “for their own sake,” and then move on to understanding the rhetorical realities of those ideas.

“But in fact, the present state of composition studies is the clearest example of the surrender of academic imperatives to the imperatives of politics” (49).

I know that Fish isn’t suggesting you can’t discuss politics ever–just that you can only do it at a point where you can step back and look at politics rhetorically (which I guess means not in the moment?), but this seems counter-productive to what we’ve been learning thus far about composition. Or, just my understanding of what we’ve learned about composition thus far. What about integrating technology into the classroom? I’m actually enjoying learning how to use the Wiki, how to blog, how to explore visual rhetoric on Flickr, ect. But, I’m also wondering if this isn’t an inherently political move. And therefore, what to do with my new interest in it…

“If you are doing academic rather than political work, you are, as I’ve said repeatedly, producing accounts and descriptions, rather than urging courses of action or taking a stand on some great question of the day” (50).

“A good liberal arts course is good because it introduces you to questions you did not know how to ask and provides you with the skills necessary to answer them, at least provisionally” (52).

Not sure what I want to say about these quotes, except that I agree with them. And, I think I might have to revamp my syllabus accordingly.