Composition Pedagogy

I coughed and hacked and wheezed my way through my semester’s last day of teaching today. It was a banner semester for plagiarism, unfortunately; three different cases, with three different solutions, two still pending. While Charlie’s work has offered me some really productive ways to think about calling into question the notion of writing as property, I think one way to understand plagiarism as a problem would be to see it as the reduction of the value of a piece of writing solely to its exchange value: its only worth to the student is in the grade it can get the student, as opposed to the use value that students get from what they learn by going through the process of actually writing a paper. In other words, one doesn’t necessarily have to buy into conventional constructions of textual ownership in order to understand plagiarism as problematic.

But I was talking about my day. I’m still sick, but it’s just been fatigue and a terrible cough and nothing else, and I think the worst of it is behind me. I still don’t feel like eating anything, much less anything spicy, which is unfortunate because the only leftovers in the fridge are all spicy. My sink is full of dirty dishes. My apartment is a godawful wreck. I can’t remember the last time I watered the plants. This is not the way I like things.

But I blushed when I got applause after telling them thank you for a great semester.

Or maybe it was applause for all of us. Applause to say you’re welcome and we worked our butts off. That’s a better way to think of it, I think.

Today, I handed back the few remaining graded documented essays, managed the semi-organized turning-in of one set of Writer’s Notebook entries, one set of all four paper drafts associated with students’ persuasive Web essays, one set of early drafts of students’ final reflective essays, and one set of written peer responses to those drafts. Beyond that, I briefly summarized next week’s activities, got class publication groups to turn in their Web site files, which I’ve spent the last couple hours putting up online (there are two groups in each section — one group for the interacting with texts essays, and one group for the documented essays — and they compete to see which group can produce the most attractive Web magazine of the group members’ essays; the group that wins gets first pick of times for the final conferences held during exam week), got them working in peer response groups, alternated between checking in on the groups and helping the few students who were behind on the persuasive Web essays to get their publication drafts together, and best of all, managed not to lose my cool when, about a third of the way through, I said in frustration, “OK, show of hands: how many people don’t have their early drafts prepared?” and all but two students raised their hands. In fact, I think that’s the moment in the class that made me grin the most. They’re running just as ragged as I am, God bless the little shits. So we got through the class relatively intact, and I told them at the end of class to have a good weekend and not freak out too much over all their other work, and told them that next week, this class is gonna be easy like Sunday morning. Which it will be: I do my best to front-load the work so first-year writing is a steady, fast pace most of the semester, until we slow down in the final week before exams when everybody’s like spastic suicidal zombies, walking around with shadowed eyes and half-open mouths.

I’ve managed to get my funding situation lined up so I don’t have to teach next semester. Just the dissertation and me, baby. But I’m gonna miss the teaching; I’m gonna miss it like hell.

John had an interesting post about the five-paragraph theme several nights ago that jogged my memory. (I note also that his post yesterday concerned the passing of Clark Kerr, whose ideas have recently informed my thinking.) In reading yesterday’s New York Times, I was startled to see the following passage:

“As a student at Jefferson Davis High here, Rosa Arevelo seemed the ‘Texas miracle’ in motion. After years of classroom drills, she passed the high school exam required for graduation on her first try. . . At the University of Houston, though, Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph ‘persuasive essays’ for the state exam, she was stumped by her first writing assignment. She failed the college entrance exam in math twice, even with a year of remedial algebra. At 19, she gave up and went to trade school.”

Such synchronicity begs investigation.
Read more

Blogging has been intermittent lately because I’ve received the latest tide of papers, and am swimming through them. For the most part, I’m happy: my in-depth work with embedding quotations into one’s own language has paid off, as has my repeated hands-on insistence that students use their handbooks to properly imitate MLA citation style. I avoid dryasdust research-paper-itis by asking students to choose an issue relevant to their majors (or prospective majors) and then take a stand on that issue that will be somehow relevant to their university peers. And we put this into practice — or at least we will within the next several weeks — by publishing them as student-produced Web pages on our Writing Program’s Web site. In such a way, I hope to help make research and writing matter for my students and for others.

Every semester, though, and especially since I’ve started teaching in a computer lab, I’ve had students who speak and write English as a second language, or ESL students for short. Often, struggling to overcome language barriers, they will put in several times the effort of native English-speaking students in order to do well in (or pass) the class. But sometimes they simply haven’t had long enough acquaintance with the language to allow their written style to catch up with their ideas.
Read more

It must be that time of the semester (no, no, Michelle, not that time): people are talking about grading student papers. So I’ll just say: me too, and I’m happy to have turned them around and gotten them back to the students. Within a week, too — pretty good. It does feel like it takes forever, and a forever of sustained effort at that, and it’s really hard intellectual work, I think, to tell students all the things that you think contributed to the quality of the final version of the paper while at the same time avoiding the discourse of “justifying” a grade, and — more importantly, and much more difficult — attempting to generalize some lessons in terms of technique that students might apply to future papers, papers which themselves may perform very different rhetorical tasks than the one you’re grading. And doing that over and over again for twenty-something students per section, multiplied by however many sections you’re teaching. Our program assigns five essays with four drafts each; conservatively assume three-page drafts, and that’s more than twelve hundred pages per section per semester just for the essays — not including the other writing many programs require (online bulletin board writing, journals, peer response writing, process writing, and so on).

But I think final drafts (we call them “publication versions” here and publish them in class magazines so the students can collectively consume the writing they’ve individually produced; to try and make the writing matter) are particularly tough because it’s the end of the process. There’s a knowledge that you’re shutting something down by assigning it a grade, and in a sense saying that there’s nothing more to be done with this essay. And the best part about teaching writing, for me, is always in seeing the way the writing changes between the drafts, the different things students try, the way they shape it. Do you remember that horribly pompous movie Oliver Stone made about The Doors? (Maybe it was appropriately horribly pompous, since they were a pretty horribly pompous band.) There was that moment in the movie when the band had just gotten together and they were jamming at somebody’s house, sounding sloppy and scattered and practically cacophonous, and then all the instruments slide into sync with one another and it’s “Light My Fire” sounding suddenly perfect and you can still hear each individual instrument doing what it’s doing but they’re all doing it together, the parts working with rather than against one another. That’s the kick I get out of reading students’ subsequent drafts; watching the disparate elements of their essays come together. And so when you give it a grade — well, that’s it. The music’s over; turn off the lights.

That’s why I think grading’s hard.

Long day today, but a good day. As usual, I overplanned the class, but it went well. I always, always overplan, and always catch hell for it in evaluations, but with a semester-long writing course, it always seems to me like there’s more to do than there is time: I know it’s foolish to think that I’ll be The One who helps students learn how to write, but I figure I gotta do what I can, and to do otherwise would be to do students a disservice. (Anybody out there with a more Zen approach to instruction willing to convince me that students will learn what they learn at their own pace no matter how much one pushes? Part of what shapes my temperament, of course, is my time as Sergeant Ed and the Army’s ethic of train, train, and train some more, and then once you’re tired and can’t do it any longer, train some more: not that I act that way, but somewhere in my brain there’s the conviction that there’s always more that one can learn.) In any case, the students in my sections were enthusiastic today, and I think part of it might have actually been due to the shift in social configurations, which I try to do at least once in every hour-and-fifteen-minute class. Today it started with some initial writing on one’s own (Writer’s Notebook Entry Number Eight: If you could have any superpower, what would it be, and what would you use it for? Who would your arch-nemesis be? Freewrite for ten minutes) and then moved to a full-class discussion (we recently reconfigured our computer labs so that students can simply swivel their chairs and face the middle and have a discussion, which may be rather panoptic as far as the position of the teacher goes but is so much more pleasant than having the computers in rows) of the second essay assignment, and then to small group work doing generative writing (to be shared with the rest of the class as discussion notes that students might cite in later drafts) and finally to a few final minutes of individual writing building on that group work, with that individual writing to be continued for homework and used as the subject of Thursday’s work. So yeah, it sounds kinda frantic, but it was tight today, and it worked. I’m happy.
Read more

I’m walking with the soles of my shoes a foot above the floor. Today was my first day back teaching for the Fall semester, two computer-lab sections, and oh it sizzled and it swung. I wish you’d been there.

I first got the opportunity to teach freshman composition five years ago this Fall, and ever since I’ve understood that it’s what I want to do. Yes, I’ve had plenty of abysmal teaching days, days when I was unprepared or days when the students were burnt out and miserable and silent from midterms, days when we found out that the state had just eliminated the majors or the funding for one third of the students in the class, and the third morning of the semester when I numbly tried to lead a numb 9:30 section on September 11 when one of the planes had left from Logan. And even those days have been the reasons why: it’s the same weird sense you get on a 48-hour desert convoy when you’re in chemical gear for the third time that day and it’s up past 110 degrees and the convoy’s doing less than five miles an hour and you’re like, “Yeah, this works.”
Read more