Optimism or Pessimism?

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Sep 162015
 

For the purposes of teaching ENC 1101, I think us, as Instructors or GTAs, face the biggest challenge to the writing process: how do we get our students to give a damn? Sure, you can threaten them with the fact that their work will be graded, and that they need a C or above to pass the course otherwise they will be forced to sit through this “hell” again next semester. But what are we actually accomplishing in doing so? Are we inspiring them to consider and think about the issues that are important to them? Or are we simply forcing them to follow a formulaic method for writing an analytical paper?

I have to agree with Natalie in her discussion post, and Murray’s concept of 85% pre-writing. For beginning writers, the ART of writing must be explored, as well as the “formula.” On Monday I attempted to hold a class discussion on this very concept, in a field which I thought was applicable to my students: social media. However, rather than let themselves truly think about the topic at hand, they all tried to give me answers that they thought I would want to hear, which was, to say the least, counterproductive. In their minds, they are not writing these papers for themselves, or to reach some deeper level of meaning, but rather they are writing them for me, the “all-knowing authority figure.” And to be quite honest, I wouldn’t even know how to properly grade a paper with completely original thought yet riddled with structural, grammatical, and gasp! MLA errors. (Flashback to GTA orientation when a paper that was grammatically/structurally sound, yet not thought provoking received a higher grade than one with creative thought).

We can say we want papers with this type of originality, and that we should strive to teach our students this, but what rubric exists for grading an innovative thought process?

The Fifteen Percent

 Pre-class Reading Response, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 162015
 

Prewriting is everything that takes place before the first draft.

Prewriting usually takes about 85 percent of the writer’s time…

Pre-writing may include research and daydreaming, note-making and

outlining, title-writing and lead-writing.

(From Murray’s “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product”, pp. 2-3)

I am impressed and surprised to find these words in Murray’s article. This is often my biggest beef with writing instructors; I have rarely encountered any instructor who taught this concept to his/her students. So often the focus is on the act of writing–the act of typing words into the big blank white square of Microsoft Word. So often I’ve heard teachers say things like, “Start writing your introduction… just get your ideas on the page.” Or, “As you write, your ideas will come to the surface.” And on the listening end, students who are already hellbent on meeting the required page length start typing and writing hysterically, without ANY IDEA of what they want to say. Et voila! Le terrible paper.

As instructors we are so often focused on the 15 percent — the writing and the rewriting. “This is how to avoid a comma splice”; “You didn’t write in MLA format”; “Go back and make these edits”; “Work on your rough draft and we’ll go from there”.

When was the last time we spent even a full CLASS period, let alone Murray’s proportional “85 percent” of our instructional time, teaching our students how to “research and daydream…”, make notes, outline, brainstorm titles or leads?

I find this whole 85/15 thing a critical element in the current debate about what we should have students write about: readings they don’t care about, or personal passion areas? The reality is the latter topics are often producing better writing in part because the students don’t need the pre-writing phase (or at least to the same extent they do for the former). I.e., you don’t need to research and daydream and brainstorm about the benefits of deep sea fishing if you naturally take an interest in it–you’ve been organically “pre-writing” in your personal life long before you entered the classroom.

I could go on about this because I think the 85/15 thing is fascinating, but consider… If pre-writing is this important (and I think it is), how do we teach it? How do we drastically alter our pedagogy and our content to address the pre-writing phase? One might also argue that if instructors are largely unconcerned with teaching pre-writing, as they seem to be, what’s stopping us from moving into this heavier focus on personal interest areas in our writing courses?

 

I have not had my fill……….yet!

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 162015
 

The New York Times article, “Can Writing be Taught?,” should be more aptly titled: Can Talent Be Taught?

Dare I say, of course writing can be taught––I’m writing this right now, in this moment in time, and
perhaps, someone is reading it shortly thereafter (hopefully). I am able to write these words because I
was put through a grueling process: education.

As children: first, we practice letter recognition; then we practice tracing letters; then we go on to
write our own letters without the help of guided dashes; then our own words; then our own sentences; then
sooner or later we are reading comprehensively, and the basic seeds of writing and reading have been
formally sprouted.

The comprehension of the mechanical side of any procedure demands a teaching process, and on equal grounds
a learning process––the master imbues his mastery upon the apprentice and knowledge is spread. This is in
terms of the purely mechanical!

Rivka Galchen asks: “I wonder if we can really teach someone to be a biologist…will teaching really produce
the next Charles Darwin or Rachel Carson or Francis Crick?” Yes, we can force feed facts to students; and
yes, with a hard enough work ethic they can learn anything. But no, we cannot teach passion, nor can we
teach a student his/her own natural proclivities.

I consider myself a naturally gifted writer and it is a talent I have been honing since I was able to use a
pen all by my lonesome––but I can’t throw a ball to save a life, let alone my own. Now, if I was so
inclined: I could certainly learn to throw a ball in league with those who were naturally predisposed to do
so. Will I ever be as good as the naturally talented? Will I ever possess the same intensity of passion
as the naturally talented? That is another matter to weigh in another hand.

Teaching writing as a science

 Pre-class Reading Response, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 152015
 

There is no singular way to teach writing because there isn’t an objective correctness to writing itself. Instead of memorizing a bank of information, we ask students to look inside themselves and write. To a new writer, or an experienced writer who has recently developed enhanced self-awareness, this is terrifying. Without a set of objective guidelines and a lens for self-editing, it’s hard to know what’s working. Students want some set of rules to hold onto, some box to check to say they’re doing OK. They don’t realize that writing is a creative process, with as many successful strategies as there are writers.

Teaching product may be a strategy for giving that sense of security. Similar to the scientific process of hypothesizing, testing and evaluating, we also teach our writing students a formula – read, discuss, analyze, pre-write, draft, revise, rewrite – with checks and criticisms at each stage. But these checks can have a limiting effect. Writing is already an intensely vulnerable activity, and critiques after a piece is done “does little more than confirm their lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves …” according to Murray’s “Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product.” The concept of teaching process is intimidating to both student and teacher in its vagueries, but breaking out of these confining routines may be more fruitful.

Writing is a Process

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Sep 152015
 

Murray’s approach to teaching writing is similar to my own. I think that we as teachers have to show our students not just how to write but how to think of writing as a process. Writing doesn’t just happen; it is an experience (arguably good or bad, depending on your viewpoint) that is underrated, under-taught, and underappreciated. I have told my students many times to plan out their essays and thesis statement before writing. I believe planning is essential and can come in many different forms. Several of my students have showed me their prewriting with bullet points and little thought bubbles and I think they are good approaches to the essays.

I think Murray is a little off the mark when it comes to his assumptions on how much time students should spend on prewriting, writing, and rewriting. He states that prewriting should take 85% of the writer’s time, while writing and rewriting should take 1% and 14%. Even as a graduate student I have never spent that amount of time prewriting my essays. I think he’s really overshooting on this point. I think that writing should take the majority of the time, with prewriting taking the least amount. It is important that writing remains the writer’s focus.

 Posted by at 10:28 pm

Lectures

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 132015
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/are-college-lectures-unfair.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

Hairston’s Optimism

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 082015
 

In our discussion last class we all noted our desire to use the new paradigm and how our efforts sometimes fall short. As many stated in their pre-class posts, we need a model in order to leave the old paradigm behind.

Hairston notes that part of the reason this paradigm shift is slow (and therefore slow in providing us models) is because of the attitude towards freshman writing courses. Many view writing as a service or a skill. Such a view “ignores that importance of writing as a basic method of learning, taking away any incentive for the writing teacher to grow professionally. People who teach skills and provide services are traditionally less respected and rewarded than those who teach theory, and hiring hordes of adjuncts and temporary instructors and assigning them to compositions courses reinforces this value system. Consequently there is no external pressure to find a better way to teach writing.” Hiring these particular kinds of instructors only further fuels the idea that their jobs/courses are less respected and since these positions don’t receive respect, they’ll continue to be filled by non-theorists. Can we break this cycle? Such a task seems difficult as more and more programs place graduate students in the classroom as instructors. 

However, Hairston remains optimistic, identifying a handful of promising signs that change is occurring. One of which relates to the classes we have to take: “graduate assistants who are in traditional literary programs rather than rhetoric programs are getting their in-service training from the rhetoric and composition specialists in their departments.” He concludes that due to this kind of training, GTAs will most likely pick up and use the new paradigm. This made me think back to our discussion of IORs. Ultimately, GTAs would benefit from having an IOR who teaches first year composition courses (I have trouble understanding why this isn’t the case for the program at FAU).  So maybe things are changing, but more can be done to offer instructors the tools and models needed to follow the new paradigm. Which brings me to my final thought: If our current system were to change (as we discussed in class Friday), wouldn’t we be moving farther away from the progress Hairston envisions? 

Creative/Academic

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 082015
 

Hello all.

When I was doing my undergrad work in Hawaii, I took a course called Comp Studies that covered a lot of the issues we addressed as a class on Friday. I wrote this paper about Creative and Academic writing, the divide between the two, and ultimately how they cannot be separated because ALL writing is inherently “creative” writing.

After reading Freire and hearing what everyone else in the class had to say, I felt myself drifting back toward that same notion. At first I wanted to side with Freire – his ideas are compelling in the beginning. But as I read on, I just couldn’t get on board with the polarization of the two schools of thought. Freire wants to get rid of this “banking method” of teaching and embrace this “problem-posing” model. We figured out in class (I think) that he looks at students, the learners, as these receptacles for knowledge and completely dehumanizes the individual.

The idea is that each individual learns by having an understanding of BOTH his/her own background, upbringing, interactions with the world AND an understanding of the fundamental tools (historical methods) for writing, rhetoric, etc. Once these two understandings happen, the individual can then create.

And ultimately, that is what we are asking students/writers to do from the onset: create something new on paper. The parameters of which are defined by these historical methods. So my question would be, how can we tell students to create something, but not be creative when doing it?

In Hawaii, the schism between academic/creative writing is HUGE because nearly all teachers on the island are white and come from a Western cannon, while all the students are either Filipino, Native Hawaiian, hapa-haole, Micronesian, etc. There is this idea that “non-white” learners need the fundamental knowledge so badly that creativity is virtually non-existent. The result of this however, is a complete disinterest in the fundamental knowledge and therefore no learning or progress whatsoever when it comes to expressing argument/ideas on paper. As I said before, this is a prime example for how the two schools of thinking are imperative to successfully teaching.

In a practical sense, I think we can encourage creativity in lesson plans, writing prompts, reading responses, and just general class discussion. I say “encourage creativity” because I truly believe that, no matter what we do as teachers, the creative mind is active at some level in every thinking being. Figuring out how to utilize that idea is the job of the instructor/program.

I encourage everyone to watch Ken Robinson’s TED Talks on Creativity if you haven’t already.

 

Also, I hope this is what these posts are supposed to look like…

Educational Arms Race

 News Item  No Responses »
Sep 082015
 

In this New Yorker article, “What is College Worth?” John Cassidy considers the value of higher ed. Proponents of expanded access to higher education have often championed its role in meeting overall civic goals — more clergy, more doctors, “better citizens,” — rather than its mere benefits to the individual. Today we often hear about bolstering the economy, boosting productivity by educating the workforce, etc. It’s good for the individual, but we really want to improve the U.S. economy as a whole.

Economist Kenneth Arrow proposed the “screening model” of education that posits college as a sorting or filtering system that provides a series of hurdles a student must pass in order to demonstrate a certain minimum level of mental fitness, the ability to accomplish assigned tasks and sociability.

Certainly there are common assumptions that a college degree 1) is necessary and 2) is a somewhat magical guarantor of future happiness and prosperity. People with college degrees do earn more on average than those without, but why, asks the article, are there so many highly educated adults taking jobs that do not require  higher education?

“Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.”

It seems like a depressing article, but he actually ends on an interesting note:

“Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education.”

There’s a lot to this article and it’s certainly worth a read.

 

 Posted by at 11:06 am

The problem with bias (revisited)… and words!

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 062015
 

Preemptive apology: It’s late. I’m tired. My grammar here may (probably will) suck. Please don’t send me to the you-know-what.

So, I guess it is somewhat funny that I name-dropped an anarchist (Joseph Déjacque, strictly due to Paulo Freire’s usage of the word “libertarian” (2)) into a conversation about an author who was a Marxist (as I believe was stated during class; however, I did the big no-no and looked him up on Wikipedia to discover that he was a Marxist humanist).  It’s also somewhat embarrassing. However, this shows how effective propaganda can be when used correctly.

I decided, as an experiment, to reread “The “Banking” Concept of Education” and highlight every instance where the words “reactionary” (or any word closely related, i.e., “reaction”) or “revolutionary” (or any word closely related) were used. The first time I stumbled across the word “oppression” (Freire 1), I decided to highlight any employment of that word (and any word closely related to it), as well. Needless to say, by the end of the second page, I realized that this task was going to be quite large. I also started highlighting additional words as I continued reading (I’ll do a small list at the end).

What this task taught me was two-fold. First, while I’ve always understood the power of words, and the importance of repetition with key words, I don’t believe I had a full understanding of how powerful they actually can be. As I stated in my previous post, by the end of the article, I had visions of barricades in my head. I had originally thought that this was simply a part of my character. While there can be no doubt that my own personal feelings played a part in this, I now understand that this was Freire’s intention. By appealing to my emotions, especially as they were already highly sympathetic to Freire, Freire transformed me from a simple radical into one of his “revolutionary educators” (3).

The second thing I learned was far simpler. I have way too much free time.

Words/Ideas (with number of appearances)*, in no particular order: Alienated (8), Oppression/Suppression/Subordination/Repression (28), Freedom/Liberty (12), Domination (8), Dehumanization/Domestication (5), Revolution/Revolutionary (11), Reaction/Reactionary (2, but I probably missed some), Solidarity (3). *I did all of this with a physical copy, so I know that I probably missed quite a few words.

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