Natalie

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!

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/

Mini-Rant re: Terminology

 Pre-class Reading Response  2 Responses »
Nov 062015
 

The Arroyo article reminded me of a question I frequently have while reading these articles: Why don’t scholars spend more time borrowing each other’s terminology instead of reinventing the wheel?

On pg. 686 of Arroyo, he writes:

Kent devises another conceptual scheme for what he calls “internalist” and “externalist” rhetorics (reminiscent of Vitanza’s “inner-directed” and “outer-directed”).

These seem more than reminiscent to me, they seem synonymous. I could totally be missing nuance between the concepts, but it seems like, based on the definitions they offer, that the whole internalist/externalist thing IS basically the same as inner-directed/outer-directed. So why don’t they just keep using the same language instead of re-labeling everything? It seems like a rat race to try and get some sparkly term or concept forever immortalized in association with your last name. While I get the appeal of that (and that it’s probably important in your career if you’re an academic), it seems like if you were truly in the business of knowledge, you’d be more concerned about communicating clearly and efficiently in order to illuminate something new.

Perhaps I wouldn’t take issue with this as much if some scholars didn’t spend so much time waxing about the noble quest of the instructor and scholar to learn, teach, and illuminate. At times it all comes out as hypocritical to me. To be fair, though, we have read scholars who seem to do what I’m suggesting–borrowing concepts in an effort to move the conversation forward. So this could just be a case of a few rubbing me the wrong way.

Berlin’s Non-existent Polished Hammer of Ideology

 Classroom Praxis, Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Oct 282015
 
  1. James Berlin maintains social-epistemic rhetoric is the best system for teaching writing because “social-epistemic rhetoric views knowledge as an arena of ideological conflict: there are no arguments from transcendent truth since all arguments arise in ideology. It thus inevitably supports economic social, political, and cultural democracy” (20). He argues that since teachers cannot get away from ideology, they need to recognize it and use it in the classroom. From your position as a teacher, what are the issues surrounding ideology in classroom praxis?

I guess I’m struggling to understand what “using it in the classroom” would practically look like, because Berlin really doesn’t get into that. He talks about all these things conceptually, but practically speaking I’d like to see what examples he’s got for me. As a teacher, yes, I think this is the ideal; we create a classroom environment where everyone is hashing out their personal ideologies and we’re reaching new understandings of truth for particular people and rhetoric’s role in all that. My caveat to that is that my students literally won’t do that a lot of the time. Right now, for example, I have some students who have hard core political and social justice views in their papers, but in the classroom they won’t speak a word (probably because they recognize that the majority of their peers DON’T have opinions or thoughtful ideology about stuff. So much of it is new to them (e.g. Apartheid–they really didn’t know what the deal was.)) Even when we talk about LGBT issues they all just go crickets on me because they’re clearly not comfortable talking about it. It’s not exactly an environment conducive to the practice of social-epistemic rhetoric.

 

I also get that he’s more talking about the teacher’s role in acknowledging ideology and “using” it, not necessarily the student’s. But, again I think of ideology as something that’s at least a little bit amorphous. Do I know my own ideology? To an extent, yes, but I’m also learning new things and adjusting my ideology along with my students. I’m recognizing it as I go, and I always will be. It’s not like a fully formed hammer that I can pull out and show to the students before I hit them all over the head with it. And it seems to be that would be true for Berlin as well, since he argues for social-epistemic rhetoric, which he describes as by nature an ever-evolving, discourse-based process, rather than a polished final product.

Reading Student Writing & Becoming a Writer

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Oct 142015
 

Whoa. This blew my mind (from Elbow’s writer vs. academic pg 73):

(1) Sometimes I’ve felt a conflict about what we should read in the first year writing course. It would seem as though in order to help students see themselves as academics I should get them to read “key texts”: good published writing, important works of cultural or literary significance; strong and important works. However if I want them to see themselves as writers, we should primarily publish and read their own writing.

I’ve never even considered this. It’s a weird idea to think of telling students that rather than learning from “the greats”, we are going to be reading their own work, making them “the greats” in their own way. This idea of belonging to a community of writers is pretty cool. There is inherent pride and accomplishment in publishing work. I wonder how much more of a confident writer I might be now if I had had teachers who really pushed me to publish something I wrote: to communicate, by publishing it, that my writing has value and should be shared. I think it took me years to even consider the idea, and I’m only just beginning to put my eggs in that basket and run with it (hence the MFA program, to which I only applied because loved ones really encouraged me to and told me they enjoyed reading what I wrote. That hadn’t occurred to me before.)

I also loved the dialogue about not knowing something if you can’t say it on pg. 77. I’d really like to lean into this as a writer in the same way Elbow mentions he did. To consider that if I feel I can’t articulate something the way I want to, it doesn’t make me stupid or ignorant or “not knowing” the topic. It just means that I’m ready to take on the challenge of trying to write about it or put it into words. And when you take on that challenge, you become a writer.

Stress is for Super-Teachers

 News Item  No Responses »
Oct 022015
 

Based on this news item and Q&A from Goop.com:

“Why Stress is Actually Good for Us and How to Get Good at it”

Posted September 10, 2015

http://goop.com/why-stress-is-actually-good-for-us-and-how-to-get-good-at-it/?utm_source=goop+issue&utm_campaign=ae65f13ebd-2015_09_10_stress&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ad74d5855-ae65f13ebd- 5866757&mc_cid=ae65f13ebd&mc_eid=75749fa98e

This article really lined up nicely with a lot of what I’ve observed in our first months as young GTA-grasshoppers. I also have had this total recurring issue where my body seems to freak out by sweating when I get ready to teach EVERY DANG DAY instead of being calm about it. It’s really cramping my wardrobe. And I kept thinking that as long as I stayed stressed and sweating it was preventing me from being the best teacher I could be… like if I could only focus on the task at hand without stressing (and sweating) about it, then I would be a clearer thinker/better teacher/communicator/genuine representation of myself. I thought that stressing about teaching was an ironic detriment to our teaching.

Yet Dr. McGonigal’s research shows that stress was/is potentially making me a better teacher if I harness it appropriately, not to mention a smarter, better human. That’s not a totally new idea, I guess, but of particular interest to me in her research/Q&A were her 3 types of stress handlers (for more info, see the last Q&A exchange in the article):

  1. Iron Man – stress is your thing; you love competition, exceed under pressure, etc.
  2. Connecting – good at asking for help, reaching out to others, etc.
  3. Growth Mindset – making meaning/purpose out of your stressful situation.

Whatever type you tend to be or approach you might take in teaching, it’s empowering to realize that all of us can improve with this stressful stuff–that we’re actually better of with it. And, that in the end it’s an indicator that we actually CARE about the students, which is great.

So even though I still “perspire” every time I get up in front of the class to teach (even though we’re months in, even though I cognitively don’t feel stressed), it doesn’t mean that my teaching’s suffering for it, or that subconsciously my stressed-out brain is shaving years off my young grasshopper life. Instead, my very ladylike perspiration might be an indicator that I’m “performing better, making better decisions, and impressing others more” (see A to Q #6) than if I was dry as a cactus. So next time I greet them all with sweat circles, my students can count themselves lucky.

 

Blooming Freshmen

 Classroom Praxis, Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 232015
 

I totally tracked with Lynn Bloom’s “Why I (Used To) Hate to Give Grades” until her last few paragraphs. The reason why is the same reason I consider this post a double-whammy in Classroom Praxis and Pre-Class Reading Response: I tried it with freshmen, and it didn’t work.

A few weeks ago I had the Bloomian inclination to have freshman ENC1101 students grade their own drafts. My thinking was partially on par with Bloom’s (in that they would shoulder the work of proof), but also around other ideas like:

  • it would force them to read their own work critically (instead of cranking it out and handing it in to me as soon as they hit the page limit),
  • they would be tricked into practicing the art of rhetoric and argument, which is arguably one of our main teacherly goals of instruction in ENC1101,
  • they would feel less entitled to A’s once they found flaws in their writing,
  • they would begin to understand, in using the grading criteria, what “standard” is used by our Department to determine their grades,
  • they would be forced to participate in a dialogue about their writing’s strengths and weakness, rather than stick to the age-old submit-and-receive relationship of grades from the teacher,
  • they might start to recognize their identity, authority and capacity to shape their own life and experience as maturing college adults, rather than passive, powerless freshmen,
  • a boatload of other idealistic reasons.

Almost all of them gave themselves A’s, though I interestingly had many students — largely female, if we want to break it down by gender — who underestimated their grade like Suzy. That might have been fine, but they had zero proof or argument as to why they deserved the grade. All this signals to me that the requirement in Bloom’s method is that you have students who are mature enough to handle the burden of self-evaluation. And it seems like that’s something they learn over time, maybe with age. On the bright side, it also showed me that there’s merit to what they’re learning in ENC: that they need to learn what argument is, and how to do it.

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?

 

Where in the World is Rhetoric-Composition

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Sep 042015
 

 

 

So, I had the start of this thought after our very first class, and it expanded/continued into our second session: what does Rhet/Comp look like outside the U.S. and U.S. academia? Does it exist? Is it called something else? Is it seen as something with inherent value? In class this week Trina/Robin both made a good point re: my Freire response: that Brazil and other countries have very different teacher-student dynamics than the U.S. does. Since international students seem to be more and more the norm at U.S. institutions, it seems like this is all the more relevant to us as freshman composition instructors; before we start talking theses, topic sentences, and the value of written argument, are there cultural bridges we need to cross to introduce students to the concept of it all?

Anecdotally, I’ve had international friends and teacher friends tell me that there are cultures where people don’t tend to communicate in a linear way–particularly when they’re trying to persuade or move someone to action–so the idea of a linear, written argument doesn’t make much sense in that context. Along with that, oral argument/storytelling/communication/history (vs. written) seems to have been the norm for (sweeping claim) most of the world for most of its history. More questions: Is Rhet/Comp a mostly European/American thing? Is Rhet/Comp, or something similar, present in other parts of the world? What does it look like? Are there cultural nuances to it? Or would we find our standard superimposed on other culture’s education systems? Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.

Banking Isn’t Inherently Bad…

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Sep 022015
 

Freire’s “Banking” concept of education is intriguing, but in the end seems oversimplified and contradictory. By classifying students as nothing more than “receptacles” in the “banking education” paradigm, Freire implies that students have no power in classroom exchange; in other words, the teacher controls the fate of the student—whether they learn or don’t learn. While Freire acknowledges that the students do have control over how they catalogue and inventory the knowledge that they collect, he implies that the teacher is the one with the power to, in this banking situation, withhold “creativity, transformation, and knowledge” (1).

In his attempt to argue for the rights of students as “truly human”, he presents them as helpless victims vulnerable to the instructor and his/her pedagogy. The reality, I think, is more complex. At some level, the teacher does hold more knowledge and power than the student, and can better identify what the students need to learn. Students don’t know what they don’t know. While I do feel there is room for instructors to bring more student-centric teaching into the classroom through things like expressive writing, to which Hairston briefly nods, the goal is ultimately to get the students engaged enough to listen to what the instructor has to say—to create wise and empathetic “depositers” (instructors) and engaged and critical receptacles (students). The relationship isn’t inherently bad.

And, at the end of the day, the onus falls on the student along with the teacher. Becoming a “truly human” student has a lot to do with recognizing that all the information you receive shouldn’t automatically become something you go on to deposit to someone else; the truly human student can humble him/herself to receive information, critically engage with that material, and confidently go on to counter it, or agree with it, and perhaps pass it on. No amount of a teacher’s insistence or orchestration can guarantee truly human students–that again gives the teacher all the power. Students have a responsibility to develop the ability to analyze, to disagree, to ask questions, and to push for more, rather than just receive apathetically.

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