There’s more than one way to bait a rhetorical hook.
In the classroom, the neophyte instructor will likely choose a blended ideological approach to first year writing. This approach may change or it may never change. That the instructor is willing to be flexible, willing to accept new ideas and experiment with them to find what’s most effective is all that really matters.
Thanks for a great class J. Mason!
Did anyone come away from reading Responding to Student Writing thinking some of the arguments Nancy Sommers makes are dated? I would argue that commenting/editing practices she’d like to see adopted are more easily applied to students in 1982, students who were undoubtedly, in their less plugged in era, far better novice writers. I would argue that they did not suffer as much from the pervasive inability to form sentences that plagues campuses today. Classroom application today of what she was hawking during the Reagan Administration often puts the cart before the horse.
It’s a blog. I can end with a cliché.
After reading several of Peter Elbow’s essays, I got to thinking about a New England writer I’ve read and reread plenty over the years.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a pioneer in supernatural and science fiction writing, had a poor attendance record at school and stopped attending altogether at around age eight. Years later, he wanted to go to Brown but for several reasons he couldn’t make it happen. So from childhood on his study was as self-guided as his writing. Adhering to many of Elbow’s principles well before Elbow expressed them seems to have made Lovecraft the idiosyncratic and original writer he became. This Elbow would have probably admired if Lovecraft had been the subject of much study when Elbow was in academia. However, given that Elbow’s ideology was driven to a large extent by the progressive social thinking of the sixties and seventies, he would undoubtedly have found Lovecraft’s racial perspectives particularly abhorrent (as would anyone).
One typewriter benefit I neglected to mention in my inarticulate presentation is defense against surfing. For the writer, the typewriter is an excellent hedge against squandering hours on the web instead of working. A writer can, of course, temporarily disable connectivity on a laptop or desktop but how long is that going to last? Eventually the urge to Google something, the urge to log into something is going to rear up. Surely that’s not to say that you can’t be distracted by smart phones or tablets conveniently left sitting next to your typewriter. But those temptations are far more escapable. Working on a device that is internet capable is, by far, a less escapable temptation.
Not all novels may benefit from management software designed to aid the drafting process. Though I think such tools are helpful for plot-driven novels, especially epics, they may not aid character-driven novels. To my mind they may saturate the writer’s characters with prescribed qualities and situations and therefore weaken or hide the unexpected discoveries the writer can make in the drafting process. I suppose, rightly or wrongly, that I have always considered the creation of character-driven novels to be something a kin to an unmapped journey. Perhaps that’s just the impression left on me from works that so often have vapory plots. Perhaps I’m really arguing for the converse but I don’t think so. I think there must be eureka moments in the drafting process that achieve their eureka-ness due to the absence of preconceived characteristics or trajectories held in the writer’s mind (or metal surrogate). A digital template seems an impediment to such moments.
I found rather early in the semester that the syllabus was going to be impossible to rigidly adhere to. Thankfully I had included language in my syllabus that reserved my right to make any changes to it whatsoever.
The first major hurdle I encountered in keeping to the schedule on the syllabus was that textbook acquisition was not a timely and uniform activity, it came in trickles. Neither the carrot nor the stick sped up the process. Frustrating as it was, there was little I could do until the class had reached critical reading mass, so to speak.
The second major hurdle I encountered was a disastrous final draft of Essay 1 in both my sections. It was so awful, I made the classes re-execute it. That certainly fouled the schedule.
A repetitive problem in keeping to the timeline on the syllabus was submission tardiness. If more than 40% of the class showed up on a Monday without the drafts for peer review, the most efficient use of the class time was not peer review, so that got bumped.
In the end, the work all got done but it was done in different sequences. My take away after this semester is that a syllabus must be fluid, not rigid or things may fall apart.
I cannot say that after playing videos from a Stanford series on writing that I saw wholesale improvements in my students’ writing. However, I can say that I saw an up-ratchet in enthusiasm.
One of my sections of 1101 was heavily populated with engineering and computer science majors. Though these particular students evidenced high levels of intelligence, many of them could not articulate arguments or support arguments at anything resembling college level proficiency. When I happened on this Stamford series, which features mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists expounding on the value of writing in their fields, I knew it would be worth showing in class. The series appeals not just to tech-weighted minds, but to any student of writing (willing or not as the case may be in 1101). For example, one video featured a mathematician who described how brilliant work from others in his field did not see the light of day for far too long because, quite simply, the creator(s) of the work could not adequately articulate the value of what had been created. They just couldn’t write well.
The videos, as I mentioned, did not rocket up grades but they did energize class discussion. I was left with the feeling that many of these students did indeed see more value in writing than they previously had seen.
On more than one occasion student absences and student lack of preparedness sewed minor chaos in my classrooms. The real problem of the two was lack of preparedness–an insufficient number of drafts for peer review—exacerbated by absences. If six students show up with two hard copies of an essay, five students show up with one hard copy of an essay, three students show up with only a digital copy of an essay, and only three students show up the proper three copies of an essay while five students don’t show up at all, how much peer review time is lost trying to manage the disparities and allocate papers?
What you might expect from this was born out over the course of the semester.
Students absent on peer review day fared most poorly grade-wise because they had zero peer review. From there, students who distributed fewer papers among their peers for review garnered weaker grades than those who distributed more or all.
It’s not rocket science but a rocket scientist might be required to conceive of a method to get students to consistently show up prepared for peer review days.
I find value in Bartholomae’s stance on the training of academic writers. That is to say that there is value in the argument that nascent academic writers develop best through teacher guidance, that mimicking nurtures them, or most simply put, that the rules must be learned before they can be broken.
Consider this line from Bartholomae’s Writing With Teachers: A Conversation With Peter Elbow:
“Picasso couldn’t have been a cubist if he hadn’t learned to draw figures.”
Please forgive the fact that I have drawn from Wikipedia for the sake of expediency. However, I think these lines sum up what Bartholomae was getting at quite nicely.
“From the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz [father] was a traditional academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters, and drawing the human body from plaster casts and live models.”
I have long noticed a wholesale erosion in the ability of many people to hold conversations. This is particularly true of digital natives though by no means limited to them. This opinion piece in the Washington Post reminded me that the pace of technology in general vs. the pace of study into how and when technology should be disseminated presents immense lopsidedness.
If children increasingly become bewitched by internet-channeling gadgets and therefore develop cerebral architecture predominately conducive to interacting with schoolwork in a digital medium, as opposed to physical and verbal mediums, you could not only argue children may then develop lifelong handicaps but that they may become a poisoned pill for human interaction via conversation. Though teacher-centrism is by no means the only component of social epistemic rhetoric, it seems an essential component. Will a significant rise in classroom tech devices erode the value of the teacher? Will the teacher ultimately become a troubleshooter for whatever the publishing company or software company feeds into the devices they’ve doled out? Will the students listen to anything a teacher says? Will a student be able to respond verbally to a question?
It seems to me it’s time for a new variety of ideology or at least an ideological augmentation: techno-transitional rhetoric. In this ideology or rhetorical enhancement, hypothetically, the teacher formulates and executes curriculum designed to bridge classroom oral discourse and learning with all manner of digital learning. I need to give the idea more thought as to whether it could stand on its own or just bolster an existing ideology.
Anyway, not that my tech tool presentation showcased this, but I love to talk. I love conversation. In light of this, some of my favorite movie lines–Kasper Gutman and Sam Spade talking in John Houston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon–are here below (taken from the International Movie Database):
Kasper Gutman: Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.
Kasper Gutman: You’re a close-mouthed man?
Sam Spade: Nah, I like to talk.
Kasper Gutman: Better and better. I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.
[sits back]
Kasper Gutman: Now, sir. We’ll talk, if you like. I’ll tell you right out, I am a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.
Twenty years from now, adults whose educations have left them in possession of digitally-oriented grey matter, adults who perhaps struggle to speak in sentences, may consider these lines to weird to contemplate.