To help me write my theory camp essay, I ended up reading quite a bit of James Berlin’s work. While I’m still not a huge fan of how Berlin writes, I feel that he offers some good suggestions on how to create a classroom that is conducive to active student participation. I feel that my greatest struggle throughout the semester was in trying to get my students to see themselves as active participants, what Berlin calls active “agents” (“Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” 491), within the class. I feel that this problem is created because of unequal power-relations within the classroom. As much as I tried to be more of a “mediator” (Berlin, “Poststructuralism and Cultural Studies” 32) than an authority-figure, the general assumption of the class seemed to be that I hold the secret for the desired “A” (or maybe just “passing”?) grade. Seeing restatements, or, even worse, misinterpretations, of things I had brought up during class present in papers was very disheartening. I know for a fact that they possess their own opinions, their own knowledge, and their own beliefs, but very few of my students seemed willing to “risk” presenting these ideas to me. However, those few students who did present their unique, personal beliefs tended to have the strongest papers for each batch of essays.

As such, I feel that Berlin’s belief that students are “transformative intellectuals” (26) is something that students need to know at the start of the semester (actually, I think they need to know this from day 1 of ENC 1101). I also feel that students need to be made aware that I am not only open to critique, but that they must question the validity of my ideas and opinions. To do so, I feel that having students first examine and discuss their own “[formative] personal experiences” (26) with their classmates, and figure out how these experiences interact with a reading, would help them to see that they are not just passive objects in the classroom.

I will probably end up rereading Berlin while planning my courses next semester. Although my inexperience with composition studies still leads to some difficulties in understanding, I’m starting to see some connections and allowing them to influence how I present myself as a teacher.

I think my students have collectively decided not to learn or adhere to MLA formatting. No matter how many times I mark their citations as incorrect, doc them points, and exhaustively discuss it in class, they remain careless.

I came into class one day with a set of my own various books, anthologies, magazines, and printed electronic articles, along with several copies of the MLA handbook. I divided my students into groups, handed out the supplies, and told them to give me the Works Cited entry for each source they were given. It was a miserable failure at first, then it became a contest, and by the end of the class my students were engaged, having fun, and to my bewilderment, coming up with the correct citations.

Before I dismissed the class, feeling triumphant in my success, one student asked why they had to learn this when they just use Easy Bib. I had to then explain to the class that their Easy Bib citations were consistently incorrect, and I had been taking points off on their papers because f this. Needless to say, she was not pleased with my response and proceeded to roll her eyes at me.

Now at the close of the semester, I sit with her final essay in front of me, and I am taking points off from her paper because she is still insisting on using Easy Bib for her citations. Stubbornness, or stupidity? Perhaps both?

This is not to say that many students did not benefit from this activity. However, it still astounds me that the negativity from one students has the ability to outweigh the positivity from several.

While doing research for Writing Program CSI, I noticed that my chosen program (Stanford’s) relied on a different model of class design. Namely, in how FYC classes are selected. Rather than having a single, uniform sequence, each class openly advertises its chosen sequence to incoming students. Classes cover topics like “Rhetoric of the Supreme Court” and “Rhetoric of Death”. The intended goal is for students to select what sort of topic they want to focus on.

A part of me feels like this would be an interesting approach, though not one that we can currently adhere to in the classroom. Many of my students are forced to go in blind; unsure of what the class is actually going to be about. The result , as I ‘ve noticed with Richard Restak, is that students end up getting burnt out on topics they care nothing about.

A part of me wants to experiment with this. What would happen if students were allowed to pick a sequence part of the way through the course, and were given the agency to pursue their interests? Would that result in stronger papers and more engaged students? Or would it just result in a scattered, unfocused class?

This semester, I found myself going back and forth between formulas and heuristics. At times, it seemed that what my students wanted most was something concrete to grasp onto, something that they could call upon again and again to get the results they desired. For instance, my one class was very concerned with Works Cited listings because of how definitive they are: this goes here, that goes there, add a period and you’re good to go! In many ways, I felt that they were trying very hard to replicate the more current-traditional learning they encountered in high school. It seemed to be very difficult for many of them to gain a level of comfort with being asked to think a different way.

Because of this general class feeling of wanting definitive answers, I often provided my classes with writing resources in order to help them feel like they had a handle on their composition. I even provided an Outline Template, and with my one course discussed the Super Secret Formula (with very mixed results). The most successful students were the ones who found some aspect of the resources lacking and so improvised in their writing. The least successful ones were, unsurprisingly, those who adhered to the resources’ instructions as closely as possible.

A little before halfway through the semester, I introduced the “Three Perspectives Guide for Pre-Writing,” or “Expander” heuristic that Dr. Mason provided us with in ENC 6700. I thought that this would turn the tide in my courses and that my students would begin thinking “outside the box.” I believed that their writing would take on new life. However, I soon realized that not only was the  heuristic generally misunderstood by the class, but even once that confusion was cleared up the students found it to be little more than exhaustive busy-work.

In my final blog post, I will talk in more detail about my experiences with using the Expander, but here I want to summarize my semester-long struggle with figuring out what works better for helping composition students learn. I believe that next semester I will work harder to introduce resources and heuristics from the very beginning, in an effort to make it clear to the students that what works for one person might not work for another. Ultimately, where I feel my teaching needs the most improvement is in the area of helping students to understand what they are doing and why. This lack on my part made it hard to implement heuristics or more formulaic resources effectively, because the students were unable to see the possible benefits of taking the time to utilize something that might not work every time. I often stressed that I wanted students to learn to be more adaptable, but for many I think this seemed like a dismissive cop-out.