All Over but the Shoutin’

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Nov 232015
 

Despite the grumbling and the fact that a 7-10PM class made for ridiculously long Wednesdays, I learned some ish, as one of my favorite 1101ers would say.

This post is to assure the dubious among you that ENC 6700 wasn’t a waste of your time. You will probably use the things you learned (assuming you were paying attention) more than you use your middle school Algebra since a fair percentage of us will inexplicably wind up spending many of our professional years at the front of classrooms. It’s what we word-loving people do when we’re not making things with words.

I spent 6 years teaching high school Language Arts with zero prior formal education in praxis/heuristics, etc. I had no idea that there were “theory camps” or that writer nerds have heated arguments about how we write and why we write. I had a few “Ooooooohhhh, THAT’S why teachers do that” moments this semester. And while the assignment that requires us to write our teaching philosophy might hurt our heads and feel like word manure, it is a valuable exercise in introspection and in the Greek maxim to “know thyself”.

Finally, to help you fill all the hours you won’t spend reading student essays during the break, a book suggestion from Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg.

All Over But the Shoutin’

 Posted by at 3:10 pm

Freewriting – Two Thumbs Up

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Nov 232015
 

On several Fridays this semester I asked my students to spend 10 minutes freewriting at the beginning of the class. Sometimes I gave them topics that were loosely related to the main ideas of their essay prompts. Other times I asked them to “vent” and tell me what they were thinking and feeling. I wanted to know what they were angry or worried or happy about. The ground rules were that their pens and pencils must move the entire time and that they couldn’t edit themselves no matter how atrocious their spelling or grammar was.

My intentions were two-fold. I wanted to show hesitant writers that words DO come, and I wanted them to understand that words are not a precious commodity to be meted out in fully-formed, perfect sentences. Words are plentiful, and shouldn’t be rationed.

After 10 minutes I asked them to finish their immediate thoughts and then we talked a little bit about what they’d discovered as they wrote. Sometimes they had tiny epiphanies. Sometimes they started out, “This is stupid and I am tired, but my teacher said I had to do this, so I am doing it.” Generally, though, asking them to freewrite enabled them to find what Peter Elbow calls the “center of gravity” in their writing and they were able to begin to scaffold their final papers around their unedited thoughts.

Allowing students the chance to be expressive in their writing and then giving them a platform to speak their ideas is of immeasurable importance as teachers build class rapport and “safe” learning environments.

 Posted by at 1:42 pm

Tech Tool Surprises

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  1 Response »
Nov 202015
 

Wednesday’s presentations were so cool.

The creative theory camp stuff was awesome in itself, but I was surprised by how much I dug the tech tools. I’m think I’m what you’d call a “Late Adopter” who needs to be more or less forced into trying new technology (examples: still using a paper planner/agenda for everything in my life, still having an iPhone 4–which I was forced to get because the flip phones required Pay-as-You-Go, etc.), but after our class I’m out to try several of those. I’d tried Evernote before and written it off, but realized on Weds. how clutch it is for getting all my recipes in one place (something I’ve NEVER been able to figure out, since so many are online.) The only thing that scares me about all this tech is accessibility of my info–isn’t all of this totally browsable and analyze-able by these people? Is that bad? I have this deep, perpetual fear of putting too much stuff on the Internet, so that’s partly why I haven’t used a lot of this stuff. Probably unrealistic? Curious how other people feel about this.

Another thing I kept mulling over was the whole DragonDictate concept in relation to rhetoric and writing. It was a weird revelation to find that I bet I would write SO differently if I was talking out loud. My written self is so much more thought-out and personal in many ways… I often feel like I’m stuck at surface-level stuff when I talk out loud, and I wonder if that would translate to my writing if I used Dragon. Probably going to test that out. Also, I’m way funnier in writing (seriously, I confirmed this with several close friends.) The little humor skill I possess would probably go down the tubes if I was orating my jokes. Goodbye witty and social emails.

Also, what happens if you laugh when you’re using Dragon? Does it write LOL or hahaha or ROFLcopter? Thousands of people would be exposed for fake laughing if you could only write “haha”s when you were truly “haha”ing.

Thanks for the sweet prezzos, guys!

Show or Tell: An old ass article addressing the Unteachable Dark.

 News Item  No Responses »
Nov 132015
 

Show or Tell by Louis Menand

-The New Yorker

My news item post is about an article in The New Yorker called “Show or Tell”. I’m not sure this is technically “news” per se, but it is definitely a valuable read for anyone who plans to take a workshop in the MFA program. I’d argue that it is worth reading for MA students as well, considering the conversation on the teachability of creativity (ie The Unteachable Dark).

To summarize: Menand poses the question “Should creative writing be taught?” Not exactly a new question, but absolutely a pertinent one. He traces the lineage and growth of MFA programs from the 1960’s and essentially shows that although writing programs seem self-serving, they give writers a context and exposure to their audience. This is a good article for anyone who isn’t exactly sure what they are trying to get out of their MFA/MA experience and I think it addresses “The Unteachable Dark” issue quite nicely.

I have spoken to a few other MFA students in the program about this in various forms, but basically I think we are here more for the exposure to each other rather than the exposure to specific material in the classroom – which opens up some interesting conversation on the way we view/approach Freshman writing.

 

Below are some notable excerpts. Enjoy!

“Workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.”

“Academic creative-writing programs are, as McGurl puts it, examples of ‘the institutionalization of anti-institutionality.’ That’s why institutions love them. They are the outside contained on the inside.”

“University creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace.”

On Revision: “It’s a method that generates copy for a class to chew on, but writing that way is like throwing a lot of bricks on a pile and then being asked to organize them into a house. Surely the goal should be to get people to learn to think while they’re writing, not after they have written.”

Classroom Distractions

 News Item  No Responses »
Nov 132015
 

How To Get Students To Stop Using Their Cellphones In Class by Anya Kamenetz, NPR’s lead education blogger.
Published November 10, 2015

This news item discusses something I see every time, seriously, every time I teach. The cell phone.

Cue the dramatic sound clip.

I haven’t found it to be a problem, per say, students using their cellphones during my class, but it isn’t exactly encouraging either. Last Tuesday I saw one of my students drawing the Eiffel Tower on her phone—something she could very well have been doing on paper. Would I care any more or less if she were to doodle in a notebook? Probably not. The question posed by the article, though, is, would she engage more if the cell phone doodle was not an option?

I sort of like the idea posed by Professor Duncan of the University of Colorado Boulder:
“I asked them to vote if I should offer one participation point for taking out their cell phone, turning it off and leaving it out on my desk. To my amazement the vote was unanimous. 100% voted yes. So they all took out their phones, put them on the desk, and we had an exceptionally engaged class.”

I could see myself trying something along these lines, offering the promise of class participation credit for the sacrifice of a single distraction. At the same time, I could see that not working at all, as certain students seem just as willing to tune me out for the attention of their own thoughts as they are to substitute class discussion for digital distractions.

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/11/10/453986816/how-to-get-students-to-stop-using-their-cellphones-in-class

Testing the Waters

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Nov 132015
 

As Emig suggests, writing is a unique and introspective method of learning. Over the course of the semester, I have been trying to implement a method of instruction that utilizes this very simple principle (even more so after we discussed it in class). Emig makes a differentiation between writing and talking that I think can be bridged in a very practical way. At the beginning of every class in which I plan on having a discussion, I try to show some type of YouTube clip or the like and have my students respond in a freewriting exercise. They know that this will not be collected. Afterward, I ask students to share their thoughts on the issues and the conversation usually commences from there.

The important part (I think) here is that students are given an opportunity to chew on the subject while they write. In freewriting, they are becoming comfortable with the topics and perhaps more importantly becoming aware of their own true opinions of the issue. “Perhaps because there is a product involved, writing tends to be a more responsible and committed act than talking,” suggests Emig. I see the value in allowing students to commit to their thoughts/feelings on a particular topic in order to open up their confidence in talking aloud during conversation. Otherwise, I think students feel as if they are shooting from the hip and don’t want to embarrass themselves publicly. Therefore, freewriting becomes a form of testing their own waters. The discussion, then, will hopefully lead the students to further chew on these ideas and move into a more solidified, thorough understanding of their ideas. 

[There is something to be said about Process/Post-Process here that I am probably only hitting on the surface level.]

I am Post

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Nov 132015
 

When I first approached the idea of post-process pedagogy, after reading through the Breuch and Heard essays, I was in the camp of why do we need a name for this and isn’t this just all the best parts of expressivist and epistemic theory without the potential limitations of the social sphere?  Then I began to think about the potential of what it could mean to be an instructor who teaches first year writing for a college composition program that subscribes to the tenants of post-process pedagogy, and I got goosebumps.

What if, I asked myself, I stopped trying to get my students to understand why it’s important for their arguments to adhere to a standard, to come from a certain place?  So I thought, if I am to teach writing without process, I would have to eliminate process from the very start.  I would have to forgo the writing prompt.  What chaos might ensue without the boundaries of the writing prompt!  No, I thought, I could never do it.  That’s just too much freedom.  No student can learn in such liberal environs.  Then it hit me.  I never had a writing prompt in FYC.

Neither of my first year composition courses (same professor) were taught with writing prompts.  In fact, the only thing I learned about the vison and revision process of writing, was that most people do it.  I am the result of a post-process pedagogy.  And I absolutely loved my writing classes, partly because I felt like what I was doing was normal, natural, not new or alien.  I wasn’t asked to conform.  I was asked to communicate.  The classroom, at that point, became simply a space for me to do what I felt I needed to do in order to convey and support my ideas about the world.  I have to admit, looking back on my work from those courses, I wasn’t an impressive writer.  I was barely passable by my own FYC standards.  But I’m still writing.  Maybe that’s enough to convince me about the merits of post-process.

“Why We Should Fear University Inc.”

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 132015
 

Fredrik deBoer is a PHD graduate from Purdue university. In his New York Times article, he rallies against what he sees as the downfall of the original intentions of the University: to be an institution of education for the people. He writes: “Enrolling at a university today means setting yourself up in a vast array of for-profit systems that each take a little slice along the way.” Both student and faculty alike have become something of a slowly shifting beast: no longer do the offices and bureaucracy serve us — we serve them, it, the numbers, and statistics that feed more funding, more money, more corporate greed, bigger wallets.

The bureaucracy has grown so sticky and thick. At first, I assumed it was only my undergrad university that was terrible in what I’ve come to call its customer service. As a graduate, I’ve quickly come to learn that is not even almost true. deBoer writes: “This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it.” The employees who run the offices are placed there and forced to withhold sympathies. They are often too old to read the screens that offer the information needed to actually help those who need it. Wrong information is spread through careless errors and college life becomes a constant headache of the what-ifs of what will go wrong.

It becomes more and more evident that through student loan entrapment, additional hidden fees, paper pushing, corporate named stadiums, and parking fees & fines (amongst a ton more) that the players in the university system are not there for the benefit of education of educating. Universities have become corporatized, and deBoer so casually points out that “corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html

Referring to the Text

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Nov 112015
 

There is a careful balance in the classroom when it comes to ideology. Like many of my colleagues have stated in their blog posts, I have struggled with my own ideology and how that comes through in the classroom. How can we, as instructors, keep our own ideas about ‘hot topics’ like HIV/AIDS and LGBT issues out of the classroom? It’s something I’ve really struggled with. In Addy’s class, her students suggested the government implement a system in which people who are HIV positive get tattoos to show their status. Another student suggested the status be placed on the drivers license of HIV positive individuals. How can we keep our own opinions out of the classroom when students have these kinds of ideas? I would hardly be able to keep my mouth shut.

So what can be done? In the classroom, I stuck to what the text said and referred to it. I had students speak to each other about their opinions but they had to refer to the text to support their point. That is something I have learned when teaching—always refer to the text directly.

 Posted by at 4:47 pm

WashPo/ASU prof byline: Helicopter Universities

 News Item  No Responses »
Nov 092015
 

I’m whacking out post categories by posting another news item, but this was right on the money…

Helicopter parents are not the only problem. Colleges coddle students, too.

from the Washington Post, October 21, 2015

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/10/21/helicopter-parents-are-not-the-only-problem-colleges-coddle-students-too/

Highlights:

  1. Written as a byline by Grade Point contributor Jeffrey J. Selingo… former editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, higher ed author, prof. of practice at Arizona State University.
  2. “A handful of big public universities, including Georgia State, Virginia Commonwealth, and Arizona State (where I’m a professor of practice), have adopted computerized advising systems that track students’ progress in classes and mine data on tens of thousands of grades to make suggestions about what courses should come next for them.” (para. 5)
  3. Obama also says liberal arts students shouldn’t be coddled (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/09/15/obama-says-liberal-college-students-should-not-be-coddled-are-we-really-surprised/)
  4. Professors are encouraged to provide “trigger warnings,” advance notices to students that instructional material might elicit a troubling emotional response from them, and on some campuses report “microaggressions.”
  5. Students are never exposed, for instance, to the feedback process that is the hallmark of most jobs today.
  6. The A is the most common grade given out on college campuses nationwide, accounting for 43 percent of all grades. (In 1988, the A represented less than one-third of all grades.)

I think the concept of this is legit, but some of these points aren’t really hitting home for me. My gut reaction is that I agree that universities are coddling students, but I think it’s in part a byproduct of universities trying to look out for themselves (i.e. not just related to helicopter parenting.) Examples: High overall grade norming and delayed withdrawal deadlines allow for better university numbers, leading to more impressive parent/curb appeal, more enrollment, more money.

Point 2… does FAU use this? I don’t think so, but wasn’t sure. I wonder if more will adapt it.

Point 4… is this the same as our weird notification system where you can “flag” a student to the Dean’s office? Otherwise I’d be interested to hear if the Emerging readings ever cause issues with students… I know one GTA mentioned that a student tried to refuse to write a paper because s/he disagreed with the essay content. (Spoiler alert: the student had to write it anyway.)

Point 5… disagree! At our program here, at least, it seems like there’s room for this (peer review, rough drafts, argue your grade, etc.)

Point 6… not sure where this came from (he doesn’t cite it), but always wonder about this. I was surprised in the workforce that so many employers lauded applicants with 4.0s. To me it was usually a red flag.

I think the true negative effect of helicopter universities is that graduates are steamrolled by the workforce and life-after-college. I for one felt like an idiot after I graduated and got my butt handed to me in the real world (and I know many friends who felt the same.) I had a cushy college experience and didn’t realize how much work was really coming to me. But maybe that’s just part of growing up.

Overall, wish he would’ve baked this out a bit more. But, imagine he’s bylining this sucker alongside 500 hours of student grading, teaching, publishing, etc. Time for a reporter to pick it up…?

 

Bonus: This is also a really interesting follow-up piece he did that looks at Georgia State, and shows that their algorithm software actually seemed to work surprisingly well… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/10/30/are-colleges-coddling-students-or-just-leveling-the-playing-field/

 Older Entries
scroll to top