Anthony

“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

Enter the Dragon

 Teaching Tool  1 Response »
Nov 062015
 

Somewhere between the final semesters of undergrad and grad school, I fell in love with the notion that writing with ink and paper was somehow more real than all the typing I’ve been doing up until that point. It was romantic in my head, harking back to my admired writers set of tools. I wanted to limit my options in what I could achieve, I didn’t want to have the ability to go back and forth and play with my thoughts and water them down with afterthought and doubt. What I thought and as I thought: that’s what I was hoping to record on the page.

Somewhere between the graduating of undergrad and grad school I amassed nearly 90 pages of handwritten hieroglyphics–scribble, if you will–neatly packaged in a lovely moleskine. This was my attempt at being a prepared grad student. I wanted to have a nice chunk of my thesis before even getting to FAU–and from what I understand, I am ahead of the curve by far. Yay! However…………I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to transfer extraordinarily large handwritten sheets of paper to text.

Enter the Dragon. Thank the lord above and below for dictation software. With Dragon, a user builds a profile and then takes their voice through a series of tests to build a level of recognition that is ever expanding and adaptable. The more you speak to it, the more it picks up on your patterns of speech and nuances of enunciation. So far, I have been able to quadruple (this is not a real statistic) my output. Instead of having to look from my deft scratchings to the screen of my computer over and over to translate, I can just read and it picks it up fairly well, for the most part. I plan on doing a presentation in class on how Dragon works.

Cursing Ignorance

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Nov 032015
 

I have a few memories of my mom as a child, not because she is dead or ran away when I was young, but because I have a terrible memory. One, she used to read to me every night until I was able to do so myself, and two, she used to tell me time and time again when a “dirty word” would slip out of my mouth that “people curse out of ignorance.” Although I have seen a lot of cursing amongst the educated grad students and teachers alike, it has become something that I think holds some weight.
Do we engage in a richer experience through complex vocabulary? Or is that we just have a more clear and expressive way to describe our experience? It seems that now as an adult (to be debated), I use curses when I want to be emphatic or humorous or highlight an emotion. My mind does not bring me first to a curse because I am unable to think or find another word that would better describe what thoughts I am trying to solidify with words. As an avid reader and writer, I live a life that is quite dramatic in my own head, turning average events and mundane memories into fantastical story arcs. I don’t know that a richer vocabulary enhances our experience, but I would say that it enhances the way we are able to express ourselves.

Conceiving Writing

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Nov 022015
 

John Bean conceives the purpose of writing as a process of discovery. When sitting down to write, thoughts are jumbled and sloppy, like trying to keep in between two
palms a handful of water; everything we wanted to say, or thought we had to say, slips between the cracks, and when we do actually hammer out some of the original ideas we were
able to maintain they only seem like a pale shadow to what was originally in our heads.

A student often fails to see their ideas as holding any weight of importance, they see themselves as responding to an assignment, an assignment that is little more than a
pain in the ass. This is what often causes for a carelessness in recording, editing, and most importantly discovering. The structure of the program that the GTA’s are forced to
follow is asking us to train our students how to write lengthy drivel bombs. Somehow, someway, it is our job in between the mountain of grading to create assignments, stimulate
discussion that will help our students to think. Over the course of the semester my students have went from “my students” to “my kids.” I care more for them now, and I want
them to succeed, not in my class but beyond. So it becomes important for me to plant the right seeds, and relate to them in the right ways, so when they leave my class they will
be somewhat equipped for the professors out there who are old and out of touch, and they will be ready to bullshit their way through, just as I have. Hopefully.

Audience Behind the Screen

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Oct 142015
 

Elbow opens his essay with an anecdote: when he can’t find words or thoughts in a social setting, he closes his eyes to ignore his audience. Often, when I am speaking or listening to people––whether it be professionally or casually––I find my eyes constantly wandering with the occasional glue of eye contact taking place just to reassure that I am in fact still listening. A lack of eye contact is often interpreted as a sign of insecurity, and while this might be true in some of my own cases, I find that I am also able to listen and piece a narrative together more clearly when I am not directly staring into a person’s soul. By shutting off or tuning out one sense another grows more strongly. My ears get bigger.

When a student is writing, his/her eyes are virtually closed to their audience––it is them, their computer screen, a deadline, and a grade. Elbow writes that “…we are liable to neglect audience because we write in solitude…young people often need more practice in taking into account points of view different from their own; and that students often have an improverished sense of writing as communication…” (50-51). Constantly, I stress to my class that what they write is part of a larger conversation. A lot of student often make pop culture references, or name check social applications, that would fall deaf upon any other generation. I try to help them understand that those they are conversing with sometimes need some explanatory detail.

Ghosts of Teachers Past

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Oct 062015
 

One of the biggest concerns I had with teaching was the strong sense of inadequacy informed by inexperience. Sure, last time I checked I had about seven siblings. And sure, being the oldest I’ve helped them all with their homework throughout the years. But I don’t know whether to consider that tutoring or teaching, or are those one in the same? There must be a difference between helping along one student into the comfort of understanding than helping twenty students.

In my last year of high school, a classmate and I helmed a Catholic school class of several eight year olds once a week. I guess we taught them––but, there is a huge gap in consequence between teaching mythology and teaching writing; one is required to survive (you pick which).

(Aside: If a student was being talkative, I would tell him/her to hold up their hand straight in the air for as long as they could. This was a big joke between me and the students, and the kids knew that. However, once a parent found out: I got kicked out of the program and was almost expelled from my high school for inflicting corporal punishment upon the children. This coming from the Catholic church. Ha.)

Two months in to teaching undergraduates and I’m beginning to wonder: perhaps stepping directly out from twenty years of learning shoes into fresh teaching shoes might be just enough of substantial experience to begin with. This brief segue from learning to teaching also affords me the understanding to relate to those I’m teaching.

When you meet a new friend, you begin to pick up an each other’s habits. Every teacher I’ve come into contact with has informed me somehow, someway; what I liked and what I disliked was imprinted and (hopefully) flows out unconsciously into a new hybrid form.

(I began to lose steam towards the end. Hope these ideas make sense……..)

Stop teaching, Start Mediating

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Sep 302015
 

There have been word(s) circling around the GTA office regarding the disappointment in the students on their second essays. Complaints containing questions, such as: why haven’t they gotten better? don’t they listen to my lectures? am I not teaching them correctly?

Now, I don’t know whether I am grading easier/lazier, or it has been my luck of the student draw pool, or I am the composition teaching messiah, or some other type of Florida magic spilling over onto me from the Magikal Kingdom––but, almost all of my student’s papers have gotten better by half a letter grade, if not a whole.

A part of me expected this to happen, and the other part is confused, because here is the thing: I don’t feel like I actually teach, and definitely don’t lecture. So what do I do? My classes fall into two usual categories: we’re either discussing, or we are doing some form of writing/reading. In both instances I try my best not to tell, but instead to ask. Me and my students end up having a conversation. No hand raising. Just shout it out when you know it!

So I wonder if we were to stop teach and were to start mediating: would we see better results? To be further determined.

The Old (Grading) Testament

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 222015
 

The problem with grading is just that: a problem. Receiving a grade as a student feels quite
natural––it is an impending doom and gloom that hangs over the heads of all––but, as a student grows from
child to teen to adult the definitiveness of grading changes. Spelling, history, and science exams
demanded a form of memorization; a cut and dry of right and wrong, something more swallowable, more black
and white. Through the advancement of schooling a student becomes less graded on right or wrong, but on
how either right or wrong is deduced, on how a student is able to critically think. It is in this facet
that grading almost becomes somewhat empty or completely irrelevant; how is a teacher to grade a student’s
thoughts or thought process? Grading becomes a contrived process on critiquing form of what can be
considered the universally accepted “how to” on writing a college paper. Bloom solidifies this idea of the
problematic grading structure: “Each and every grade reflects the cultural biases, values, standards,
norms, prejudices, and taboos of the time and culture (with its complex host of subcultures) in which it’s
given. No teacher, no student (nor anyone else) can escape the tastes of their time” (Bloom 363). During
my undergraduate, I can safely assert that from professor to professor my papers were similarly
accomplished in skill and scope; yet, every once in blue semester I’d have a professor who I just couldn’t
get to give me the “A” I knew I deserved. Something just wouldn’t click between my writing and their
thinking; and while that is fine, it raises a level of injustice being served to students who just can’t
click with their teacher.

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.

Better Late than Never, I Always (Have to) Say

 introduction (test post)  1 Response »
Aug 262015
 

this is a test post, eh? alright then, seems to be working quite well so far. although, changing my password proved troublesome as I have no patience for learning new technology––but, mission accomplished nevertheless!

who: anthony
what: humanoid
when: 1990
where: new york
why: …..

I am currently listening to Mr. John Coltrane’s Ballads as I write this little intro in between finishing the countless readings for class today. And I have to say I agree with him: we are too young to go steady, ENC 6700!

Who else calls bullshit when they say “you’ll get used to the heat”?

….I hope this wasn’t supposed to be formal….

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