Trina

One Final Note

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  1 Response »
Dec 062015
 

We’ve talked a lot this semester about the best way to teach writing, and it seems that in the writing community there is no real consensus. Yet.

Addy brought up a question in an earlier post when she talked about the hideousness of the class who asserted that all HIV-positive people should be forced to wear an identifying mark to warn unsuspecting sex partners of their dangerous status. It was a  ludicrous proposition from so many angles, and one that horrified their teacher. Addy worried in her post that by sharing her opposition to the idea, she might be forcibly changing their opinions, and from a pedagogical standpoint, wasn’t that maybe a bad thing? Like, maybe practicing “banking education”?

Those of you in the Wednesday night class know that I developed a major teacher crush on Paulo Freire this semester. In his final book, which was published just 40 days before his death in 1997, Freire made a proposal, an “ethics of freedom”, that he thought every teacher ought to adopt.

“The fundamental task of educators is to live ethically, to practice ethics daily with young people and children. This is much more important than the subject of biology, if we happen to be biology teachers.”

I work hard to help first year writers improve their essays, but it is more important to me that my students leave me as better people than as better writers.

 Posted by at 8:22 pm

In the Era of ‘No Child Left Behind’, Is It Ever OK for the Teacher to Throw in the Towel?

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Dec 062015
 

After our first class meeting, a student approached me and told me she was taking ENC 1101 for the 3rd time. She had freckles and round cheeks and the most melt-your-heart brown eyes I’ve ever seen in a student. As we talked, her eyes filled up with tears and she looked at the floor and said, “Never mind,” and abruptly left the classroom.

That evening, I checked out my roster and saw that she wants to be an elementary school teacher. I sent her a quick message.

“You seemed discouraged when you left class this morning, and I hate to think that you are feeling defeated before we even get started. You are not alone. Several of my students are taking ENC 1101 for the second or even third time. It is a challenging class and you should look at that as a good thing if you can. Very few worthwhile things come easily.
By now you should have some idea of which areas of your writing need work/help. When you turn in your writing sample to me, please make a note at the end of what you need help with and I’ll try to think of a way to make it easier to understand. What kind of feedback have your other instructors given you?
I see that your major is Elementary Education. I have been a teacher for a long time, and I have learned that some of the very, very best teachers are the ones who struggled and persevered. You are going to be a wonderful teacher. Hang in there.”
I wanted her to start to take ownership of her learning, but every time she and I spoke, she shot down every suggestion I had with a flat, “That won’t work.” When I asked, “OK, what will work, then?” she’d just say, “I don’t know!” She wouldn’t even try.
By the time essay three was due, she was sending me messages that said, “We both know that I’m not going to have a draft for peer review. So what can I do instead?” When I told her that the peer review process was a required and helpful component of the class, she stopped coming to class on peer review day. Then she stopped turning in her essays altogether. When November 13 approached, I thought for sure that she would drop the class, but she attended right up to the last day.
This afternoon I was sifting through my students’ Final Reflection assignments. This is what she turned in, in its entirety.
Part One
I have learned nothing that I didn’t already know. Everything that was taught in this class
was taught in high school. And the first two times I took this class. Nothing has changed. I still
make the same mistakes I made in high school and because I learned nothing new it’s not going
to change.
Part Two
There are no skills that I learned that I didn’t already know. And the skills I know aren’t
going to be helpful in the future.
Over the course of the semester I communicated with this student privately — via face-to-face conference, email, Starfish, and through the OSD — no fewer than a dozen times. I couldn’t overcome her defeatist attitude. She is the only student who earned an F.
I can say with a clear conscience that I did my very best with this student. I have no misgivings about documenting her non-passing grade. Sometimes it’s OK to throw in the towel.
 Posted by at 5:45 pm

All Over but the Shoutin’

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Nov 232015
 

Despite the grumbling and the fact that a 7-10PM class made for ridiculously long Wednesdays, I learned some ish, as one of my favorite 1101ers would say.

This post is to assure the dubious among you that ENC 6700 wasn’t a waste of your time. You will probably use the things you learned (assuming you were paying attention) more than you use your middle school Algebra since a fair percentage of us will inexplicably wind up spending many of our professional years at the front of classrooms. It’s what we word-loving people do when we’re not making things with words.

I spent 6 years teaching high school Language Arts with zero prior formal education in praxis/heuristics, etc. I had no idea that there were “theory camps” or that writer nerds have heated arguments about how we write and why we write. I had a few “Ooooooohhhh, THAT’S why teachers do that” moments this semester. And while the assignment that requires us to write our teaching philosophy might hurt our heads and feel like word manure, it is a valuable exercise in introspection and in the Greek maxim to “know thyself”.

Finally, to help you fill all the hours you won’t spend reading student essays during the break, a book suggestion from Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg.

All Over But the Shoutin’

 Posted by at 3:10 pm

Freewriting – Two Thumbs Up

 Classroom Praxis  No Responses »
Nov 232015
 

On several Fridays this semester I asked my students to spend 10 minutes freewriting at the beginning of the class. Sometimes I gave them topics that were loosely related to the main ideas of their essay prompts. Other times I asked them to “vent” and tell me what they were thinking and feeling. I wanted to know what they were angry or worried or happy about. The ground rules were that their pens and pencils must move the entire time and that they couldn’t edit themselves no matter how atrocious their spelling or grammar was.

My intentions were two-fold. I wanted to show hesitant writers that words DO come, and I wanted them to understand that words are not a precious commodity to be meted out in fully-formed, perfect sentences. Words are plentiful, and shouldn’t be rationed.

After 10 minutes I asked them to finish their immediate thoughts and then we talked a little bit about what they’d discovered as they wrote. Sometimes they had tiny epiphanies. Sometimes they started out, “This is stupid and I am tired, but my teacher said I had to do this, so I am doing it.” Generally, though, asking them to freewrite enabled them to find what Peter Elbow calls the “center of gravity” in their writing and they were able to begin to scaffold their final papers around their unedited thoughts.

Allowing students the chance to be expressive in their writing and then giving them a platform to speak their ideas is of immeasurable importance as teachers build class rapport and “safe” learning environments.

 Posted by at 1:42 pm

Ideology in the Classroom — Hip hip hooray!

 Pre-class Reading Response  No Responses »
Oct 282015
 

When Palm Beach County School District hired me in the middle of a school year to teach Language Arts to 11th grade honors students and a 10th grade ESOL class, I had no clue what I was getting into. I’d had no desire to be a teacher. I’d had no training in pedagogy or classroom management, and certainly none in how to communicate with 32 Kreyol-speaking kids and one poor little Spanish-speaking girl. I know literature, and I know grammar, and I have always been a good student myself. How hard could it be?

Sweet, stupid me.

I had a couple of things working in my favor. First, the former teacher had been an angry crone. On my first day, the principal told me, “She was mean to my kids, so she had to go.” Chances are, my new students would welcome me. Second, I was humble enough to understand that I’d have to learn along with the kids, and that I’d have to show them that many components of the teacher-student relationship are reciprocal.

One of the best things a teacher can do in a classroom is create a classroom environment where students feel comfortable and confident enough to share and discuss and even form personal ideologies. Showing my students that writing-intensive classes are opportunities to decide what they believe and discover who they are is one of the. most. important. things I do as a teacher. It’s not just good for the kid, it’s good for society.

That’s not to say it’s an easy process. My students and I were talking this morning about whether students or educators bear the most responsibility for affecting social change. Initially the students said educators should bear the load because we know things and it’s our job to share information.  “But what,” I said, “about those public school teachers who are told that if they share their political or social or religious beliefs with ‘impressionable’ students they’ll be fired? What about those ultra-conservative parents who refuse to allow LGBT groups to talk to their kids in school?” Educators who encourage open discussions in their classrooms without ground rules (i. e. agree to disagree, always be respectful, no name calling or personal attacks, a list of off limit words — and increasingly, acknowledgment from parents and signed permission forms) often run into metaphorical booby traps and landmines.

I know for sure that I am a better teacher because I know what’s important to my students.

 

 

 Posted by at 5:05 pm

Like Forgetting A Dream

 Pre-class Reading Response  1 Response »
Oct 212015
 

The Radio Lab podcast was so fascinating that I shared it with half a dozen smart people and talked about it with 2 others.

One of the most compelling ideas in the podcast is that Ildefonso, the focus of the short documentary “A Man without Words”, says he can no longer remember how to ‘think’ the way he did for the first 27 years of his life. I imagine it might be comparable to the way I can’t remember even the most vivid dreams mere moments after awakening. How often are our ideologies and beliefs and memories replaced by new knowledge and experiences? What do we lose when we learn new things?

Curious about what Ildefonso looks like? See the A Man Without Words trailer from Zack Godshall on Vimeo.

 

 

 Posted by at 5:01 pm

Thresholds of Violence (and Fear)

 News Item  No Responses »
Oct 142015
 

 

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s newest New Yorker article, Thresholds of Violence: How school shootings catch on.

Gladwell references a theory first published nearly 40 years ago by sociologist Mark Granovetter.

“Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.”

Gladwell applies this theory to school shootings and says that a lot of kids and young adults who are currently planning and executing mass shootings may actually have pretty high thresholds of violence; that is, they really don’t have an inherent, evil desire to do harm or any real emotional reason to do so. He also gives evidence that at least one of these young people has planned or committed violent/mass shootings as a “symptom” of being on the autism spectrum (!).

The whole thing is fascinating. It makes me wonder, are you more, less, or just as worried as you’ve ever been about encountering a gunman on campus or in the grocery store?

 

 Posted by at 6:14 pm

Teaching By Conference

 Post-class Discussion Reflection  No Responses »
Oct 142015
 

When we read Donald Murray’s reflection on the writing conference, I thought, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be great to have the autonomy to teach that way?”

Turns out, yes, it would — in theory, and with a lot of practice.

My student conferences were largely successful. I channeled my inner psychotherapist, bit my tongue, and tried to be “The Listening Eye”.  I enjoyed talking to my students, and was gratified to see how seriously they were taking the class. It was fascinating to see the myriad and personal approaches they had to reading, drafting, and writing. Some of them were very, very self-aware of their limitations and strengths, and all of them were able to articulate a plan to achieve the “grade goal” they set for themselves.

It was exhausting. I don’t know how by 1979 Murray had managed 30,000+ student conferences — and 35 on the day about which he wrote.

 

 Posted by at 5:15 pm

Is It Possible to Grade Writing Objectively?

 Pre-class Reading Response  3 Responses »
Sep 232015
 

One thought, among many, as I read Lynn Z. Bloom’s, “Why I (Used to) Hate to Give Grades and Lester Faigley’s “Ideologies of the Self in Writing Evaluation”:

Last week I asked my students to do an in-class exercise in which I asked them to give me an evidence-based response to the question:

“Based on what you presently know about the 2016 Presidential race, who would you support if Election Day was next week? If you don’t yet have a strong candidate in mind, who have you already eliminated from the race? Why?”

The results were

6 – “For Bernie” because he’s genuine, is truly a “for the people” politician and has good, common sense ideas
3 – “For Donald” because he’s a business man, we’re in debt, and we need someone to negotiate a debt settlement
2 – “For Marco” because he is open and accepting of immigrants and has good religious values
1 – “For Hillary” because she did the whip and nae nae on Ellen
19 – “Not Donald” because he’s dangerous, a blowhard, anti-women, anti-immigrant
3 – “Not Hillary” because she’s dishonest
1 – “I’m not voting, politics are stupid, this assignment is stupid and I don’t care”
1 – “None of your business, Ms. Sutton. We shouldn’t be talking about politics in class and I don’t appreciate you asking this question and trampling on my right to privacy”

As part of her/his argument, that last student, who has kept me on my toes all semester, reasoned that divulging that information to me might put her/him at a disadvantage since we can’t help making judgments about people based on the information we’re given.

And s/he’s right, in his/her own convoluted, rude way (consider your audience, grasshopper!). Right away, I formulated stronger positive opinions about some of my students and gave myself a mental high-five for being “right” about others.

 

 Posted by at 6:01 pm
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