Exciting! Secret! Thoughts!

cornell hall is way too expensive

cornell is also a maze: casino-like or department store-esque?

both

business students are very tan and well dressed

philadelphia seems a challenging place to teach

my aunt lives in a convent in philadephia

sections are unsafe for children to walk in

pirate shops provide a good cover for cbl organization

participating in cbl is a lot simpler than having to organize it

cbl can be modeled on unexpected things

who does it help, the student or the community?

…certainly not the faculty

temple didn’t dig it at first

cbl won’t get you tenure

tenure committees are frightening even in theory

the upper crust provides good vegan fare

rebecca needs more sleep

The apocalypse is upon us! The sky has, in fact, fallen upon my disenchanted and despairing head!

What dire predictions have been fulfilled? My iPod has short-circuited. My papers are due. The sun is hotter and brighter than ever and high-school singers have descended en masse on the previously pristine environs of Columbia.

What could it all mean? A brief consultation with Nostradamus and a variety of end-of-the-world specialists concludes that the end of the semester is upon us.

Everything that can go wrong will, computers are crashing as we speak and printers are revolting from the overload. Abandon hope, all ye who have papers yet to write.

Ah for the sweet dream of summer…

Has anyone else noticed the surprising number of Band-Aids that are stuck to the pavement all over campus?

While shuffling along towards class or tutoring or to any number of coffee vendors, I have the unfortunate habit of staring at the ground to avoid uncomfortable contact between other persons on campus. I look for feet approaching, and if I see nothing entering my personal space, I can pretend that I alone exist in this pavement filled world, set to the soundtrack of my iPod, the dissociation is heightened by the surreal yellow tint of remove provided by my sunglasses. It is like living in a moving. A dialogue-free musical starring two tripping sneakers facing the harsh reality of cement and isolation. No wonder I don’t have friends.

Anyway, such was my dour experience of crossing campus in mundane non-stimulation Until! I began noticing all of the Band-Aids stuck to the ground. There are plain, flesh tone ones, bright colors, cartoon characters, whatever. And they are everywhere.

Despite how gross this is, I guess it makes sense, right? The campus is filled with young-adults/teens really, who skin their knees skateboarding or falling down from frivolous shoe heights, partying, distraction by poetry etc. all interested in fun, cute, or cartoony means of preventing infection and promoting healing.

What is the point of a Band-Aid, after all? To stick. And stick it does. The Band-Aid is not blown away by wind, its effects cannot be absolved by a cleansing spring rain, nor will any happy citizen pick it from the ground for fear of epidemics.

So, there they stay. Permanent, vibrant used Band-Aids.

There is a lesson for teaching in this somewhere.

Instructions:

Be prepared! Anyone may have to present

20 minutes: conference length

not just reading syllabus

overall goals

describe pedagogy

teach about ideas of course

explain your choices

how you did assignment

PRESENTATION= performative

May include involvement

discussion

Anyone tired of the same old plagiarism statement? I know we’ve all heard it before: according to university policy, the penalty for plagiarism is expulsion, probation, failing etc.

Not to minimize the importance of stressing the severity with which plagiarism will be punished, I humbly submit a priceless commentary on plagiarism that just might match the tone of my class.

To quote The Smiths in the hit song “Cemetery Gates”

“You say: “ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’ve read well, and I’ve heard them said
A hundred times, maybe less, maybe more

If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loans”
There’s always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall”*

Now, my students might not care too much about disappointing me, but who could refuse this guy?

I’m not even going to get into the practical applications of the song “Meat is Murder” when presented around Thanksgiving break, but let’s all seriously consider incorporating it into our schedules.

*The Smiths. “Cemetery Gates.” The Queen is Dead. Warner Bros, 1986.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: people like to talk about themselves. (Have I ever said that before? possibly no, but I’m saying now and I am tempted to say it in capital letters).

Therefore, to avoid boring the students in class as we, with worry in our eyes and tremors in our hearts discussed last class, (I include myself in the we, although I didn’t vocalize my shared terror, I thought I would articulate it here, in the privacy of my world-accessible blog) it seems to me that if they are able to write about themselves that they would necessarily be fascinated.

Therefore, as I am designing my syllabus, I am keeping this idea in mind. I like the assignment we came up with in class, but what if the famous person discussed isn’t Richard Nixon or some such admirable and trustworthy figure, but the student. That’s right, Mr. or Ms. Topdog of the dorm, ipod listenin’, bookstore shoppin’, cheap beer drinking freshman.

Therefore, let us say I take the format of the assignment developed in class. But the peron picked is Sally or Fredrick and the hidden obsession is their own. Followed of course by associative research, revision into different media and analysis…yes…

Therefore: How could that be boring? This could potentially shift the boredom to the teacher in the case that the student’s hidden obsession is radically boring. I would be an example of this. I’m going to talk about myself now,

Therefore, proving my intial statement, which I will rearticulate (as to prove the other assertion, that I say it often) PEOPLE LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. I disclose my secret obsession (you guys can keep a secret right?) I like to crochet and knit. I pillage the library for books of patterns, I spend hours mesmerized by this craft. I made afghans for everyone in my family two christmases ago. I am (terrible, terrible pun coming up which anyone who crochets will get) hooked.

I was so NOT bored writing that. If I bored you, I apologize.

1. Entertainment

The cure: originally called “The Easy Cure” dropped easy in 1978

Continually changing sound, ranging from pop-y to psychedelic to dark and despairing, post-punk, new wave

Killing an Arab based on Camus’ The Stranger

Smith worked with Siouxsie and the Banshees in places like the bat cave

2. Personal: At 5 on I have been constantly moving. From KC to Omaha to a variety of small towns in Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska, to Ocean City Maryland to Baltimore to Washington DC to Des Moines through various small towns then back to Kansas City.

When moving from Washington DC to Des Moines my mom and brothers and I took a grey hound bus across country. The driver would get really annoyed when people asked questions. Especially as was contrary to posted sign.

Some kids tried to rob my brother in Chicago.

The bus station in Des Moines was incredibly clean.

I don’t like staying in one place too long.

I am interested in Gothic novels in the Romantic period.

These novels are divided into two categories, female gothic vs. male gothic or horror vs. terror.

Regardless of the type, typically involve a long series of removes from dismal locations.

The supernatural is constantly played with.

Often dismissed as morbid, sensationalist.

Charlotte Smith is a premier gothic novelist

Connections:

The cure is constantly moving. So am I. So do the heroines/villains in gothic novels. There are not bat caves, but subterranean passages in a lot of gothic novels. The underground. The name smith recurs.

Yancey: 

How Yancey’s text reads like a web page.  A plurality of narratives instead of a single thread.  Find one you like.  Jump back and forth.  Read the images.

“All of which leads me to

ask: how many compositions

are in this text?”  300

 

Poses the good question: “ How is it that what we teach and what we

                                                     test can be so different from what

                                                     our students know as writing?” 298-99

“the members of the writing

public have learned—in this case, to write, to

think together, to organize, and to act within these

forums—largely without instruction and, more to the

point here, largely without our instruction. 301

 We are at a moment in our technological advances comparable to 19^th c. inventions when technology again facilitated a circulation of writing.

“what ever the exchange value may be for these writers—and there are millions of

them, here and around the world—it’s certainly not

grades. Rather, the writing seems to operate in an

economy driven by use value” 300-01

 

So,  if this is the moment of in composition, where student writing doesn’t match what we teach, where the students write without instruction and have a use focused agenda in circulating there writing…where does that leave us?

 

First moment: tremors

English departments per se are disappearing and in their place, things like communications and humanities, down by 1/3!!  We are becoming ‘irrelevant’.

Second moment: refocus, reorganization.

 

Refocus ourselves: “Still, too often we define ourselves

as that first-year course. Suppose that if instead of focusing on

the gatekeeping year, we saw composition education as a gateway? Suppose

that we enlarged our focus to include both moments, gatekeeping

and gateway?” 306

 

Instructor who tried to get as many students to drop as possible…

 

Reorganize the course: “it becomes pretty clear that we already inhabit a model of communication

practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those

multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked

one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both

inside and outside school.

This is composition—and this is the content of composition” 308

 

Third Moment: Back to the Drawing Board

“At this moment, we need to focus on three changes: Develop a new

curriculum; revisit and revise our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts;

and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” 308

 

What will the new developments be? Social/collaborative process/revision oriented instruction…

 

“To put the

point directly, composition in

this school context, and in direct

contrast to the world context,

remains chiefly focused on the

writer qua writer, sequestered

from the means of production” 309

 

Again, Latour…gathering/extending information

 

pointers for new curriculum: circulation and real world, best medium, transfer between media, prepares them for writing public

 

“So to study text production, text reception, text meaning,

text value apart from their animating activities is to miss the core of

text’s being” 312

Interesting way this has been done…marginalia. The Blake/Reynolds feud again.

 

a second kind of circulation equals revision… 315

 

Remediation, revision. Cant do it all in first year course, just the beginning.

 

As texts and text productions circulate: 

“the canons interact, and through that interaction they contribute

to new exigencies for invention, arrangement, representation, and

identity. Or: they change what is possible” 317

 

“In other words, you can only invent inside

what an arrangement permits—and different media permit different arrangements”  317

 

So I guess new media papers are n dimensional instead of one dimensional…

 

The arrangement then, must match the intention.  Composition becoming more poetic.  Form itself as a nuanced piece of information about the composition.

 

 

 Fourth Moment: It is time to change

“technology. If we continue to partition it off

as just something technical, or outside the parameters governing

composing, or limit it to the screen of the course management system,

or think of it in terms of the bells and whistles and templates of

the PowerPoint screen, students in our classes learn only to fill up

those templates and fill in those electric boxes—which, in their ability

to invite intellectual work, are the moral equivalent of the dots on

a multiple choice test. Students will not compose and create, making

use of all the means of persuasion and all the possible resources

thereto; rather, they will complete someone else’s software package;

they will be the invention of that package”

320

Equals writing for a reason and to an unlimited audience///is that so different after all?

 

Sirc:

“Colle’s complaint holds true for Composition’s virtual academic machines, our “compositions

for living in,” neatly inflected according to the design principles of clarity, simplicity,

harmony. Everything orderly, visible, easy to understand. And utterly uninteresting, because

the pedestrian’s need for inner drama has been actively designed against. It’s all about the

flow of information, streamlining the audience-traffic through the city-text” 15

 
What is the problem:

“jack haven logic of mainstream composition” 12

This defined: “By this I mean a textuality whose form and content fuse together in perfect synergy: stilted academic prose as the ideal medium to represent this image of university pomposity. The Jack Haven paper stands for the logic of mainstream composition, which has always been about bringing a conventional world more clearly into focus”  12

The phony language of the academy.  In killing the individual we negate elements to gather…

 
What is the solution: virtual urbanism

“This is virtual urbanity: a belief in people’s natural language patterns” 14

“I want to counterpoint this to a kind of cultural undercurrent that has also been present at

least since 1954, which I’m calling virtual urbanism: a different textuality, one in which

actual humans, with needs, fears, desires, memories, drift through the important spaces of

their lives, encountering other humans similarly engaged in the ongoing mystery of existence” 12

 
Why must be virtual, why is it urban.  Where did this name come from?

virtual urbanism, the most human moments of connection, the search of the hacienda, sifting through primoridal sands 12, can we see undertones of expressivist here?  It is also about tapping into something primordial and expressing it.  The difference being Thompson vs. the pillar of expression.

 

composition instructors as architects, rigid modernists or those who let the building express the sensations of the soul

no foot traffic, no nooks to explore 15

 

“My larger point: powerful, alternative formal possibilities are now key genres of public

discourse, and kids understand them, and Composition Studies could care less” 14

Not only pleasurable, but inviting.  The instructor being concerned with the experience of the student writer/ or writer if we will.  The writer becoming interested in the experience of the student.  This requiring room to explore. 

 

“An inviting compositional space must allow enough of these ambient unities to explore, and one way, I

think, is through infilling the space with a lot of pleasure-zone texts that readers want to poke

around in: make the curriculum a more colorful, human-scaled street-scene” 17

 

Where did process/expressivist pedagogy go wrong?  When did this become the new current tradition?

 
forgot to include what we like, the process/journey is what its about, but we have to go someplace nice.  The process of writing becomes stilted.  I don’t care how nice the scenery is, if you are going to the dentist, the drive isn’t fun.  If we allow for students to tap into the joy of writing this is impossible when they lack any passionate interest in what they are writing about.

 

What this can accomplish:

The goal is not to heighten an approximate simulation, but simply to move through moments in the hopes of finding understanding, maybe even pleasure. This textuality is bound not by formal conventions, but human passions. 12

 
How to allow for each student to create a pleasurable or understanding learning experience? 

Creation of open-ended assignments/ problems of evaluation.

Reintroducing the pleasure principle.  How does this approach tap into the pleasurable experience of writing. 

Letting them write about themselves but gathering information.  Students can be surprisingly knowledgeable about the things that interest them.  Not only is there a surprising amount of writing that takes place in the virtual urban-scape, but a good deal of enthusiastic research also. 

What is our goal if this is already taking place?  To hone this?  To allow it access to the academy?  To listen to it?  Will that make others want to listen to us if we are no longer Jack Haven?

 

Why must this focus be an undercurrent, demonstrated by subcultures, urban, avant-garde?

Why is new media so sexy?  Is this part of the pleasure in itself?  Its got nooks and crannies to explore, it is rebellious, it is individual, it is a get together.  New Media turns the composition paper into a rave in warehouse.

 

“Through his vignettes, Ghost chronicles the lives of both hustlers and the artists who rap about them, two subcultures of the same urban pulse, restlessly at home in a place where they might as well be banned for life in their search for the real” 13

 
What are we going to pile on?  Assignments as comprehensive, semester long piles of information that become more nuanced and winding?  These assignments kids want to read and write about, the freshman as their world being much more inviting than any tough love text book.

 

Not simply changing assignments.  What else we got?  Changing  instructor mentality.  Changing the rubric of evaluation: “then text might be thought of as constructed situation (situation construite)—modifiable, charged (hopefully) with the contingency of a momentary ambiance (achieved through the transitory formations of technology),rather than the permanence of “good writing.” 17

In order to get them to add on rooms to the hacienda, Sirc demands we first build it.  Give them a place to gather.

Though this is not related to the material we have covered in class (are any of my blogs, anyway?), it is a promising instance of my increasing fluency with technology. I have figured out how to upload pictures of my cats! Please be kindly introduced to Ophelia and Aurora…