Composition Pedagogy

My Big Fat Lie

preterite Asides, Composition Pedagogy

I think I’m starting to miss that regular rhythm of Friday Non-Dissertational entries I had going. A while back, as an audience analysis lead-in exercise for their persuasive/documented essays, I gave students the following scenario:

You stayed out really late last night partying with your friends, and — as a result — you completely slept through this morning’s College Writing midterm that was worth 40 percent of your grade. Write a note explaining what happened to:

  • Your favorite grandparent.
  • The Undergraduate Dean, in the hopes of staying off academic probation.
  • Your best friend, who last night kept telling you, “Come on, just one more.”

Students immediately asked the obvious question: Can we lie? (My shocked-sounding response: Would you lie to your favorite grandparent?)

Anyway: after that exercise, and in the slowly escalating end-of-semester crunch, I thought we’d do a (hopefully) fun bit of low-stakes writing at the start of class today. I offered the following weblog prompt: tell the biggest, most absolutely ridiculous pack of lies you can come up with. And I must say, I was impressed with the creativity and humor of the results, which are linked from the main course weblog at http://scripta.vitia.org/.

But the reason I mentioned the Friday Non-Dissertatonal stuff above is that in writing along with them, I found myself kinda struck by inspiration for this thing that was more a tall tale than a bunch of lies, and I just had to get it out. And, well, I’m proud of it. There’s a bit of family folklore about my dad throwing a rock through one of the windows in the house, and when Granny asked him why he did it, he told her that the wind blew it out of his hand. I like to flatter myself that my better stories come from a similar impulse towards fiction. So, hey: maybe it’s not as good a lie as the ones that some students wrote, but I had fun doing it today. Check it out.

Assignment Sequences

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

In thinking about my own teaching practices, I’m hoping I might get some responses from other first-year composition teachers to a few questions. First, how many folks teach something resembling a ‘personal essay’ (as opposed to, say, a research paper or a persuasive essay or a response to a text or a rhetorical analysis or what-have-you) as the first unit in a semester? Second, how many folks teach a variety of fairly identifiable genres, like those I mentioned in my first question? Third, for those who do teach something resembling a ‘personal essay’ as the first unit in the semester, what are your reasons for teaching it first — and for those who don’t teach it at all, what are your reasons for not teaching it? Fourth, how many folks teach a sequence of assignments that asks students to make major choices about which essays they will significantly revise and which essays they will leave behind?

I know there’s considerable literature in our field devoted to this topic, and since my first year of teaching, I’ve felt like I’ve had a decent sense of what the arguments were for the various practices, even as my own practices changed and shifted and evolved according to what I’d read, to my sense of my students’ shifting needs, and to institutional pressures — but in the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing some significantly recurring phenomena in student essays that make me call some of that into question. I’m still trying to sort this stuff out, so I can’t really be more particular right now, but just hearing about what other people do, and why, would help me to put what I’ve been seeing in student papers into perspective vis-a-vis my own teaching practices.

That said, I guess I’d better at least offer a little bit of rationale: for the past four years or so, institutional pressures (I’m at the UMass Amherst Writing Program, former home of Walker Gibson and Peter Elbow) have turned me towards seeing the personal essay as a way of asking a student to take an initial stake in the writing that the course asks them to do, and towards seeing the personal essay as something accessible and open. Such a perception understands the personal essay as somewhat loose, rambling, or discursive; the diametrical opposite of the impersonal cut-and-dried five-paragraph theme. The essay sequence I’ve been attempting to refine since 2000 moves from introspection to public engagement and back again, and I’ve lately begun to wonder if such a sequence is based on some problematic metaphors of writerly ‘development’ that simply don’t work — too blithely Lacanian? too literalist a take on Dewey and Britton? — for college-age students, especially in an age when process pedagogy has long since become widespread even in secondary education.

This semester, I’m calling the first essay “Experiences, Contexts, Perceptions”; from the title, I hope, a fairly obvious request for students to examine how what they’ve lived and where they come from affects their view of the world and others’ views of them. I ask them to incorporate some of these observations into the next two essays, “Reading and Writing Difficult Texts,” which is my attempt to revise Peter Elbow’s take on the back-and-forth between the personal and the textual. The next assignment, called “Subjects and Perspectives,” is an attempt to take the personal and textual work of those first two essays into the public sphere with a rhetorical analysis of the range of discourse on a particular subject, and serves as pre-writing for the following assignment, which asks students to take a personal position on the subject they’ve chosen and use documentation to support that position. So, clearly, I’m favoring certain kinds of writing as somehow more ‘basic’ and others as somehow more ‘advanced’ — and I’ve lately begun to see that as problematic, especially in the way I feel the need to offer certain similar responses to so many student papers.

I haven’t mentioned the types of assignments I taught when I was at Pitt, but if you’ve encountered Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, you might have some sense of how the institutional pressures there were radically different from the pressures here at UMass. So maybe one more (perhaps deceptive) question: there, at Pitt, first year composition was called “General Writing.” Here, they call it “College Writing.” What might that say — and how is the first-year composition course ycleped at your institution?

Asking for Essay Feedback

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Since I’ve made such big changes to my syllabus, I decided to write Essay 1 along with my students, and I’m hoping for feedback from you, dear readers and colleagues.

The essay requirements posed to my students, further detailed here, are as follows: in a minimum of 750 words, and being (probably) a first-year student in a new environment, discuss how people perceive you here at UMass versus how you were perceived at home. Use the zip-code-generated demographic data from MSN.com’s House and Home Web site to expand your discussion and talk some about consumptive practices. Get off campus and do some situated shopping-related ethnographic research. Read a short essay (either Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Science of Shopping,” about retail anthropology, or David Guterson’s “Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured,” a nice bit of reportage on the Mall of America), and connect it to your experience.

Draw some theoretical conclusions that frame the particulars of your lived experience. Your audience for this essay consists of your classmates; consider this essay as one way of introducing yourself to them, since they’ll be required to read it.

So: for my essay, I’d be grateful for critiques, feedback, criticism, and any ideas about how to improve it. Along with the process work (giving students points for revisions made between drafts), I’ve told students that I’m grading their essays on content, structure, style, and their mastery of both innovation and conventions. I hope you might offer me comments based on those criteria, or, also, comments that might suggest useful alternative critera for grading essays. (It’s 1,701 words, more than double the minimum I required from them: what could I cut?)

Here goes, and my thanks:

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Doing the First Essay

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Students, today, turned in digital versions of the final drafts of their first essay. I’ve been doing some writing along with them, typing along in the exercises I assign when I’m not writing the next steps up on the board. There’s a reason for doing so: I’ve never done the first essay quite like I’m doing it this semester, so I want to try and see if it works, if I can string all the pieces together in the way that I’m asking the students to do. I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far, but I’m also realizing that — if I’m going to blog with my students — I better write with them, too. So tonight’s project is a new draft of the personal essay I assigned them to write.

If I post a draft, might there be anyone willing to write me a peer response in the next couple days? I think students might enjoy seeing their teacher assigned some revisionary writing.

Macho Teaching Swagger

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Had a decent teaching day today, despite the all-day grim and rainy grey, and the way that the halls of the building I teach in retain humidity to a horribly swampy degree. Odd observation: on two successive days, I’ve had most of the students in one section show up well prepared, and most of the students in the other section show up poorly prepared. We moved ahead OK, but after explicitly going over the homework in each class and putting it on the board, I can’t figure out why one section felt so nonchalantly inclined to univocally admit their I-don’t-care unpreparedness and the other section was ready and eager to work.

When I was a sergeant and the squad was out of order, I’d drop them and do push-ups with them, calling out, “One, two, three, Zero; One, two, three, Zero,” until all of them got their backs straight and actually started doing the push-ups, and then we’d begin the count, “One, two, three, One; One, two, three, Two; One, two, three, Three;” up to twenty or fifty or whatever. After a while with me, if they were mad too, the squad would bellow out the Zero-count for at least the first ten reps or so, and they’d eventually decide how many reps we did. They’d get sadistic, too, seeing if they could slow down the count in the last five enough to make my arms quiver, seeing if they could make me keep up, to punish me with their discipline.

It was a lot easier than teaching college. I wish I had a handle on how to kick-start that sort of motivation and self-awareness in an academic context — but maybe that just marks me as a would-be authoritarian teacher, telling tales about macho Army swagger.

I hope not. I guess what I’m getting at is the idea of self-awareness and cohesion in a class, and trying to figure out why one section seems to hang together more than the other. Maybe some of it’s just random chemistry, but when I think about it, I realize that I teach the sections back-to-back on Tuesdays and Thursdays — and so maybe I learn lessons from one session about what does and doesn’t work and carry them immediately over into the subsequent session.

Perhaps. Every class is different. But I really feel like what I do doesn’t differ much, generally speaking. I plan well, I have the materials up, and we tend to follow similar routines in each section. One general difference might be that students in the earlier section often want to interact with me on a one-on-one basis, while students in the latter section often don’t hesitate to call out a public question when things are confusing. Still, it’s odd: I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a radical difference in character between sections. And maybe all the above ruminations are a way to talk about how I know it probably isn’t me, but I wish it was, because then I could try and help make it better.

(Addendum: not trying to call any of you out, discipuli. Just talking generally about how the classes went. If you like, I hope you’ll address the topic in your reflections on the in-class work.)

Aaaaand We’re Off!

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Well, today was it: along with peer review of students’ “middle” drafts, we launched the small-group student weblogs, linked from the main page of The Vast UMass College Writing 113 Online Empire. Forty students, two sections, eight weblogs named after — well, um, that’s their little weekend extra credit project, and I’m figuring they’re all more than smart enough to find this place, so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now. For me, it felt like a fine and productive day for both sections, with none of the usual add/drop week mad panic to get everybody up to the same speed. As I’ve noted before, a day in the classroom — even when it goes horribly — almost always feels better to me than a day when I’m not in the classroom.

I pitched the weblogs as not necessarily mandatory, suggesting that keeping a private paper journal that only I would see as being OK, too, but doing my best to make a persuasive case for the beyond-a-grade value of public writing and interaction. Today’s initial entries are already up, as well as a couple comments (!), which I didn’t even require yet. So I’m pretty psyched. Next week, we’ll start a discussion of what makes a good post and a good comment, and start trying to put our conclusions into practice.

For right now, I’m gonna listen to some 80’s hair metal and have a couple glasses of wine to celebrate a good day in the classroom.

As for my students who find this place: you’re plenty welcome here, of course, and I’ll ask you to understand that I’ll only talk about the class in general terms, and never mention — even anonymously — specific people here. It’s important to me to see your writing and your privacy respected, and I’m never going to talk about you behind your back. If you ever have any concerns about what gets posted here or on your weblogs, please don’t hesitate to talk to the Writing Program’s director or ombuds officer, who will have the administrative privileges to correct any problems on the weblogs, and who can also express their concerns to me without divulging your identity.

So, now: let’s do this.

Teaching’s Assembly Line

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

Today was a good teaching day with my sections of computer-lab first year composition. I’m happy to see the students, and I was grinning when I left campus. I like them a lot. And we got a lot done today, even though I overplanned, like I always do, and we didn’t get to everything I had in mind, so there’ll be plenty of overlap and catch-up time with the new add/drop students.

As I indicated yesterday, we did break up the activities, moving from individual writing to one-on-one peer interaction to individual writing to group sharing and discussion, back to peer work and individual writing. This back-and-forth is something, to me, that feels much more native to the computer classroom than to the paper-and-pen classroom. In the paper-and-pen classroom, a discussion or one-on-one peer work or small group collaborative writing can go on for the entire class session, but in the computer classroom, I always feel like I’ve got to mix things up and shift from task to task, and I wonder why it’s so.
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First Day Back, and After

preterite Composition Pedagogy

Tomorrow will be my first day of the semester, which is why I haven’t blogged much lately: been busy overhauling the syllabus and the assignments, testing readings, attending meetings, getting weblogs set up, and the like. Here’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

After the usual first-day business, students will start with paired introductions to one another: interview your partner, and — based on your interview — write up a brief introduction of your partner to the class, including — at the end — a judgment about what type of person she is. (“Jane is a Democrat with Republican parents, she squeezes toothpaste from the end not the middle, she likes cats and menthol cigarettes, and she would never spit out a window. From this information, I might conclude that she could never make it at Harvard, and that’s why she’s here at UMass.”) Go around, read the introductions out loud. Discuss, briefly.

On your own, go back to your computers and type up a paragraph that addresses the misperceptions and the most important omissions in your partner’s introduction of you. Conclude with a general statement about what people often get wrong about you, what they often get right, and why.

Next, pair up with your partner again. Exchange zip codes. (If you’re not from the US, it’s fine to choose a place in the US where you think you might want to live, and find its zip code; or you can use 01002 or 01060 or some of the other towns around here.) Go to MSN’s Neighborhood Finder site and enter your partner’s zip code. Browse through the information that comes up, and then click through the “PRIZM Neigborhood Types” links and try to find the description that seems most applicable to your partner, paying particular attention to “Lifestyle Preferences”. What kind of a person is your partner? Write another brief paragraph about your partner, revising your characterization.

Discuss as a class. How does MSN get it wrong and get it right? How important are people’s perceptions of you based on where you’re from and what you buy? (It may be useful here to bring up the connection of schools and property taxes in the United States, since this will later on connect to the readings themed around education, and ask students about what sorts of schools they came from and how they characterized students from other schools.)
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Two-Year Colleges & Class

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

John at Jocalo recently posted some extended polemical thoughts about the relationship between composition in four-year universities and composition in two-year colleges. My initial sense is one of agreement with John on many points, and particularly on the point that university-based compositionists hold many unexamined and problematic assumptions about community-college-based compositionists, and that those assumptions have remained troublingly unexamined for a long time, in what might be described as a sort of willful blindness. I won’t here rehearse all the arguments John makes: he makes them far more passionately and eloquently than I could, and his thoughts are well worth reading and considering at length.
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