Christopher

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

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.

Puzzled over Process

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Nov 062015
 

Thinking on the how-centered approach versus the what-centered approach as presented in the essay “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’” by Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch.

To teach writing is decidedly a complex endeavor, and codifying it as an anything-centered approach is problematic beyond the binary established by the how v. what dichotomy—even the essay submits that process pedagogy is both what-centered, content based, and how-leaning, as it “in many ways encouraged a shift away from content-based approaches”—so how, then, do I define what I do in my composition classroom if even the broadest terms of categorization leave room for a defense of the antithesis?

I don’t want to emphasize process as content, but I also don’t want to lose good writing as a model for learning.  To explain what I mean I look to the schedule on my syllabus, an exact replica of the template provided by my teaching assistantship program, to yesterday’s events.

NOV 5

PEER RESPONSE DUE

Sample Work

Sample work.  An example of the type of writing expected of a composition student in my classroom, or an example of the exact opposite.  Content, either way, what-centered, but content used and presented to facilitate activity, how-centered, not an attempt at the “mastery of writing techniques,” but an act of writing toward clarity, toward discovery and meaning, not toward some perfectly cut puzzle piece that could fit into the “mater narrative” of the writing process, whatever that is, but the opportunity for writing to occur and recur.

Does content force my students into a box with however many other pieces of the puzzle—the jumbled image of what “good writing” looks like—or is content simply the opportunity for writers to sit down at the table to take a look at what’s there?  Maybe, if I put some of the pieces out, some of the ones that I see working best, maybe then they’ll craft a piece of their own.  Maybe their picture will look better than the one I had in mind.

Really Thinking

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Oct 212015
 

That episode was fantastic.  I just sent it to four people.  If I had the power I would weave that into the fabric of the curriculum for Lit Theory courses, because that seriously would have helped me pick up on Saussure and Derrida.

For me, the most compelling element of the “Words” episode of the Radiolab podcast is the bit involving the rats.  This seems to make the most sense in relation to the idea that language constitutes reality, which is something I’ve always struggled to understand.

The rats can see color.  For their purposes, they understand the color blue.  And they understand direction.  Left.  But they can’t seem to connect the two ideas in a way that makes sense of the world around them.  Left of blue.

“These different kinds of knowledge can’t talk to each other.”

The inference is that rats don’t have the language required for this kind of internal discussion because children behave in a similar manner until they reach an age where linguistic communication seems to allow for this very connection to take place.  Left of blue.

“And those aren’t just words that come out of the child’s mouth… inside the child’s brain, what that phrase does—is link these concepts together.”

I operate under the stance that reality is subjective.  Sure, things may exist apart from me, that is to say outside of that which I experience through sensory intake, but I can’t know that.  I know that certain things feel objective and stable, but I can’t very well exit myself to find out if those feelings are grounded in something other than a singular subjective reality.  I can, however, communicate with myself to try to reason with what it is that I am experiencing as the real—that which feels objective.  But, in keeping with the rat study, that cognitive reasoning is based on my ability to use language to make connections between ideas.  Without language there is no connection, ergo there is no reality.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience seems to complicate this—being removed from the realm of cognitive connection and relegated to immediate, present tense sensory information.  The question then becomes, in a state where language is not possible, was she experiencing reality?  Or, a bit beyond the discussion of the podcast, did she only experience those events in retrospect once she could effectively communicate her experience?

More Like Prolonged Blinking

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Oct 162015
 

The rhetorical approach, if I have this right, must take into account the audience.  That’s kind of imbedded, right?  So what to make of the correlation between the rhetorical approach and an approach that, right out of the gate, speaks to “an instinctive attempt to blot out awareness of audience”?

I think it’s fair to say that the title of Elbow’s piece, “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience,” is more bark than bite.  By this I mean that his essay does quite a bit to reinforce the rhetorical approach to student, professional, and academic writing, mainly in terms of revision—an element I probably latched onto simply because it is a practice with which I have plenty of experience.

“In short, ignoring audience can lead to worse drafts but better revisions.”

I would argue that the act of revision is, among other things, the act of becoming and, as a result, paying attention to audience.  Elbow goes on in the section he titles “A More Ambitious Claim”

“To celebrate writer-based prose is to risk the charge of romanticism: just warbling one’s woodnotes wild.  But my position also contains the austere classic view that we must nevertheless revise with conscious awareness of audience…”

Is revision not part of the argumentative process?  If what we’re talking about is composition, then we must consider the revision process an element of the writing process, as a part of the composition whole.  If a part of the whole includes attention to audience, then I would argue that Elbow’s approach engages with the rhetorical approach, at a bare minimum, in its attention to the revision process, even if the audience for revision purposes remains the writer as self.  In terms of technique, the approach seems very much the same.

Ghosts of Authority

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Oct 052015
 

Until recently, roughly the last two weeks, I have not been teaching my students.  This is not to say that my students have been without instruction, but that their instructor has not been the person I think of when I think of myself.  Largely this feels like a matter of what Skorczewski refers to as “the conflict between what a teacher should be and what we might call a ‘teaching self.’”  But, if I can wax poetic in a blog post about authenticity, this also feels like possession—like the ghosts of authority would move in at the beginning of every class and the me that I know, the me that people outside of my classroom might recognize, would move out.

Admittedly this was my own doing.  I invited “unconscious and terribly messy” conversation with the voices of instructors past, and my own voice, somehow, became lost in the reverberation.  This was, I believe, partly because I wanted my students to view me as a professional, as someone they could respect, someone they could learn from, someone they would want to learn for.  A totally reasonable expectation, I felt, not beyond the abilities of the supernatural.  So I let the ghosts speak.  I forewent, even, the first day ice breaker for fear of humanizing myself, and I became the faded essence of my ghosts of authority, no better than an echo.

Well, to carry on with this motif, I have emerged from the fog and exercised the demons.  My students and I, that is to say my newly found teaching self, had a frank discussion about the university structure and our positions within it.  Ironically, the act of materializing above the din of my instructional ghosts to present my authentic self to my students was also the act of becoming more transparent.  Perhaps now my students see me as somewhat of a transliminal being—one who straddles the line between instructor and student, who hears the voices of ghosts and contributes to the discussion—but who is ultimately human.

Re: “Inventing the University”

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Oct 012015
 

Bartholomae talks about “a necessary and enabling fiction at work” in student writing.  Brilliant.  That phrase puts words to an observation I’ve been making over and over again during this last month.  I just haven’t been able to sit with it, to think on why all of the papers I’ve been reading sound disingenuous, overdramatic, or, more to the point, fictitious.  What mindset are these students adopting that limits their use of genuine examples and authoritative tone?

Could it be that my students are writing to me, to a fictionalized version of me—some amalgam of all the voices they hear when they think of the sound of an instructor, an authority figure?

“When students are writing for a teacher… students, in effect, have to assume privilege without having any.”

I can’t remember asking for this kind of simulation, this parody of authority.  But this is what I get.  I can hear this assumption, this gesture toward the vague sound of academic discourse, in too many of my students’ essays.  Who demands this of my students?  How has this fantasy taken hold of their minds—that they cannot, as Bartholomae might suggest, “extend themselves” into their respective subject matters to explore and discover, that they must, instead, struggle outside of their means to take command, to instruct?

My Two Cents on Felt Sense

 Pre-class Reading Response  2 Responses »
Sep 172015
 

The “felt sense” as something that is somehow tied into the physical sensation of a writer, a “bodily awareness” of some kind, doesn’t make intelligible sense to me.  In short, I can’t feel it in the way that it’s described in the Perl piece.  I can, however, reason with the ideas that drive the “felt sense” concept when they are contextualized as part of the vision and revision aspect of composition—something akin to intention.

“What is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ corresponds to our sense of our intention. We intend to write something, words come, and now we assess if those words adequately capture our intended meaning.”

Beyond who we are as writers, we should be able to relate to this sentiment because of who we are as conscious beings.  Intention—not a formulated plan, but an inborn drive or motive—feels like a pivotal and unavoidable step in the process of consciously, perhaps even unconsciously, communicating ideas.

If this is as close as I can get to the “felt sense” concept, I’ll take it, and I’ll run with the idea that intention is a vital aspect of the composition process for any writer.

Can intention, in this sense, be taught?  In simplest terms, no, I don’t think so.  But, I also don’t think it exists in such abstract terms as “body and mind before they are split apart.”

If we can experience intention and communication, then revisit the latter to “adequately capture” the former, are we not fundamentally moving toward sensational composition?

Composition is…

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 012015
 

I was reading through some of the Enculturation articles, and I couldn’t seem to get the Sharon Crowley idea out of my head that, “[The] history of close ties between rhetoric and composition ended in the late-nineteenth century… when ‘composition’ acquired a new meaning and a new praxis…  given it by the Arnoldian humanists who invented the first-year requirement…”

That’s giving a lot of power to one mid-nineteenth century critic and those who would choose to follow.  Or, in Crowley’s words, those who would “kill off the vestiges of rhetorical study that remained in American colleges at the time.”  Why is “kill off the vestiges of” her preferred word choice?  Why not “changed” or “overshadowed” the former methods of rhetorical study?  Why give your enemies the power to take down the classical rhetoricians?  And they are, clearly, her enemies.  But she isn’t a rhetorical purist, either, falling back on the work of Charles Sears Baldwin, a late nineteenth early twentieth century rhetorician, in lieu of the ancient Greek or Roman writers.

It seems as though she is less concerned with the general removal of rhetoric from composition, and more concerned with the resulting methodology.  Sounds like a legitimate concern to me, and by the end of her piece I can’t help but be on board, for the most part, with her argument, but I feel that there is still room for “intellectual sophistication” and rhetoric in my composition class.

Florida man…

 introduction (test post)  2 Responses »
Aug 272015
 

My name is Chris.  I am from Florida, and I am a man.
“Florida man goes to ridiculous lengths to prevent his car from being towed”
As such, I have accepted the stigma of my demographic.
“Florida man run over by Facebook lover who refused to let him drive grandmother’s truck”
I may not always embrace the associated epithets.
“Florida man has admitted his role in the trade of 59 illegally caught wild snakes, including a live rattler mailed to him in a coffee can”
And I don’t think Florida is for everyone.
“Florida man stabbed cat after it threw up, deputies say”
But I do feel a certain sense pride about my people.
“Florida man interrupts weather report by catching fish in street with bare hands”
Us Floridians.

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