Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Looking back, or ahead: opening day assignment

The 13th week of class is the time to harangue now-familiar students to get cracking on those research-paper rough drafts, most definitely not the time for recapping the semester's beginning assignment. And yet, as always, I find myself about this time looking ahead (my own procrastination strategy), looking forward to the fresh start that January will bring with its rosters of strangers' names.

Classmate snapshot (original version). Pick a representative moment in yr life, a tiny slice no more than a minute or two that captures some aspect of yr life or personality that you'd like to share. Maybe you were driving through Dunkin Donuts this morning for yr daily French vanilla iced coffee, singing along to whoever-it-is on yr car stereo, as you drove up to the window momentarily embarrassed at the mound of crumpled McDonald's bags on the floor of yr car. Maybe you were sitting on yr new overstuffed couch at 2 am,  watching Casablanca for the thirty-eighth time, with a tub of pistachio ice cream on yr lap. Maybe you were standing at the kitchen stove trying to cook, with yr two-year-old clinging to yr knees and yr preschoolers tearing lettuce at the kitchen table. (Contrary to my own obsessions, food need not be involved.) Maybe you were at work. What were you doing? Who else was there? What do yr surroundings look like? Or maybe you're involved in one of yr many hobbies. Imagine this moment as a snapshot (or a very short clip of film).

Now pair up with another student. Introduce yourselves. Each of you must interview the other, asking about his/her snapshot moment. If the snapshot is not clear in yr mind, ask questions to sharpen the picture. Take notes. Remember the tools of the fiction writer: setting, character, action, dialogue (a line or two can "snap" a character into life). For homework, write one paragraph that gives the reader this snapshot of yr classmate in words. (If you get home and find that yr paragraph is thin and skimpy, make something up.)

Goals.

• to get students talking to each other
• to get an initial portrait gallery of the class (for semesters when I'm using a CMS or blogs, I ask students to post these paragraphs--so useful for orientation to technology involved as well)
• to obtain initial writing sample for informal assessment of writing "levels"
• to talk about specific details (evaluating which details are "best," i.e., most revealing) , showing not telling, revision, and all that beginning-of-semester jazz (to be reprised throughout)

The essay according to Heilker and Hohn

I have been gestating a post (for not quite nine months) based on two things I read at the beginning of the year: Paul Heilker's essay "Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts" in the December 2006 issue of CCC and an essay  by Donovan Hohn in the January 2007 issue of Harper's titled "Moby-Duck." I was especially happy to see Heilker's name in the CCC TOC. Though I've never met or communicated with him, I felt a personal connection of a sort: he had (unbeknownst to him) stood as an ally in my disastrous (in the mealy-mouthed Ivory-Tower sort of sense of the word) attempt to overthrow thesis-driven writing. Or at least to open up a dialogue, to question its bullying domination of FYC in my department, to argue for a more inclusive, baggier sort of definition of what we were looking for in the freshman "essay."

It was about four years ago, and I was still relatively new to the dept. I had been doing freelance editing at home for nearly fifteen years and was thrilled to be back in the middle of (what was to me a rather horrifying term but a welcome idea) the "academic discourse community." After a meeting in which one faculty member seemed to claim that the thesis was the sine qua non of FYC, I'd sketched out a tentative position paper, just a couple of pages long, arguing, in essence, that writing could be exploratory as well as argumentative. (The disastrous part involves that faculty member's response: my memo described as an "unsubstantiated diatribe" and my behavior as "totally lacking in professionalism and collegiality.") In my note I quoted from Heilker's book The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form:

The incredibly tight discursive structure of the thesis/support form makes the additional ideological claim that the complexities of the world's problems and issues are not problematic at all--not a complex web of interconnections that need to be addressed from multiple perspectives in a collaborative dialogue--but really rather neat, "slottable," and solvable in a very short space using a single point of view and formulaic thinking, a procedure which will leave one with no bothersome loose ends. (6)

The appeal of rhetoric

I confess to mixed feelings about  teaching  the apparatus of rhetorical appeals in FYC. Passing through two graduate creative writing programs, I never learned that framework and considered that I could write quite adequately, thank you very much, without it.  When I finished graduate school, I was happy finally to discard the rigid mask of academic tone (in the graduate lit classes I took) and began writing essays that traced out ideas, circled around analogies, sought out reverberations and associations. By the time I started teaching again some fifteen years later, though,  the comp/rhet influence had infiltrated FYC and I was obliged/expected to teach rhetorical appeals as the foundation of a program devoted to classical argument. When I began to teach the appeals, I had my doubts whether that layer of nomenclature was useful for FYC students, or was it too difficult an abstraction, complicating beyond their needs (what's a complete sentence? how can I connect general statements to supporting details? how can I hold my sentences together into coherent paragraphs?) 

Observation Day

Inspired by an interesting New Yorker article by Caleb Crain ("Surveillance Society: The Mass Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life"), I have declared yesterday and today Observation Day(s), yet another exercise to encourage students to pay attention to their world. I asked students to pick a spot on campus where they could sit for 15 minutes and take field notes: physical description of the space (what details create its atmosphere?) and the people moving through the space. I am again this semester asking students to consider and write about various aspects of technology, so I doubled-up assignment objective to introduce them to the wiki (the first time I've used one as well), asking them to post their observations here.

Perils of the personal (essay)

Among some FYC folk, the personal essay seems to have fallen into disfavor these days, supplanted by that sturdy studly specimen, the thesis-driven argument. I've been trying to think through some of the problems with the standard personal essay assignment: "Describe a significant experience, one that changed you in some way, brought you to some new realization about yourself or your relationship with others or the ways things work in yr world; use the fiction-writers' tools to bring us inside that experience; indulge in a summary fillip of philosophizing about the significance of this transformative event." The results have ranged from the conventional car accidents (in an AAA report I recently read that 25% of drivers get into car accidents their first year of driving; according to my unofficial survey 97% of those believe it was the most significant event of their young lives) to last semester's astonishing collection of psychiatric disorders and abusive situations, legal problems and teenage pregnancies. Some of these essays have been first-rate, but many more have been difficult to respond to or evaluate, either because of students' uninspired choice of topic or seeming inability to remember or at least evoke lived experience or my own queasiness, in some cases, about attaching a grade to such sad stories of personal trauma.

Sequence in the composition class

I'm in an especially expansive Grand-Scheme-of-Things mood these days. The beginning of a semester is always a susceptible time; it's maybe a bit worse this year because I just finished (a draft of) an essay that's been about 20 years in the making, about the phenomenon of hitting the wall academically speaking (or going about as fur as we can go, as the Oklahoma lyrics put it), so I'm in interdisciplinary mode. Maybe that's where composition teachers belong. At any rate, what I've been thinking about is the sequencing of instruction in courses (promising myself I will eventually get around to my own syllabus).

Consider these tried-and-true options:

• The chronological approach. Of course, history classes are the prototype here. Lay out your timeline, chop off your eras, decades, monarchs' reigns or presidents' terms, alternating rhythms of war and peace. Mark off those cataclysmic events: the burning of the library at Alexandria, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Causal chains link the events of history, so this is a logical approach (though other more thematically based structures are possible, I suppose). This approach also show up, for somewhat less compelling reasons, in many literature classes.

Ethnographic fieldworking: in practice

Results of my FieldWorking trial (three sections of freshman comp this past spring) were, not unexpectedly, somewhat mixed. On the plus side, students chose a variety of interesting subcultures and sites, resulting in increased student motivation, I think, and most certainly in livelier research papers. However, about 25% of them failed our department's portfolio assessment, a troublesome concern that demands some serious analysis.

Course overview. I structured the course as a series of short (one or two page) writing assignments, most of which could at least potentially be reworked into a culminating 8-10 page ethnography. We first spent some time talking about the idea of a subculture (a group of people with a shared system of beliefs, rituals, artifacts, and language who exist, at least part of the time, in a common space). What are the rituals and artifacts associated with (my ubiquitous example) the kindergarten class? Do the customers at Stop & Shop form a subculture? What stores do seem to have associated subcultures (a health food store, maybe, or Hot Topic)? Initial short assignments included writing about one's own subcultures and reflecting about experiences of being an insider/outsider. To introduce the process of taking field notes, I brought classes to the campus art gallery and instructed everyone to take notes; in later comparison we considered individual approaches, noting in particular the issue of subjective impression vs objective details (use of double-entry notetaking introduced here). Other short assignments included the following: a research proposal, place description, artifact analysis, comparison/contrast or classification related to subculture or field site, and an annotated bibliography. The final ethnography combined personal observation with background "traditional" research (approx. 4 text or Internet sources, generally to provide a broader context for specific field site chosen)

Ethnographic fieldworking: in theory

After several semesters of frustration with the dreaded freshman research paper (schizophrenia, death penalty, perils of cigarette smoking, and so forth), I decided to try out a new (to me) approach this spring, using Bonnie Stone Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's FieldWorking as primary text. In brief, the idea is to have students observe, research, and write about a subculture, defined by the authors as "an invisible web of behaviors, patterns, rules, and rituals of a group of people who have contact with one another and share common languages." The students must choose, then, a group of people who have a shared sense of identity, in some fashion, and who can be oberved to interact in some setting, termed the fieldsite.

At first I thought the approach seemed a little too narrow in a way, more suited to sociology or anthropology classes rather than composition. Then I started thinking about the subcultures to which members of my own family belonged: long-distance runners, community theater actors, assisted living facility residents, scrap metal dealers, emergency room staff, dancers and dance moms, gardeners, bingo players. I thought about Portuguese social clubs and fish markets and bakeries (and other such places with strong ethnic ties), people who work in cubicles, members of high school marching bands. There seemed to be rich possibilities for finally interesting research material.

Connecting the dots (or not)

In explaining her resistance to a former teacher's criticisms (apparently), one of my students wrote that she didn't want to have to connect the dots for her readers. (Was she concerned for her readers' tedium, or her own? Maybe both.) Sympathetic to her position, I reminded her that it was still her responsibility as a writer to make sure that her dots indeed were connect-able, that there was a recognizable picture there to be discovered. I have been thinking lately about Connect-the-Dots pictures and how they relate to several assignments I've made in the past, the degree to which transitions/connections are necessary or desirable, and the transaction(s) between writer and reader.

Formal thoughts: counterpoint

Shuffling through some web sites the other day (instead of grading essays, no doubt), I found an interesting article, "Forming and Meaning: Writing the Counterpoint Essay" by David W. Chapman. Why do so many students have such difficulty producing good writing using the rhetorical modes approach? Chapman suggests that perhaps the problem is due not to the confines of the standard forms (whether decreed by a teacher or willingly assumed by a student), but rather the scarcity of forms to which the students have been exposed. In particular, he writes about using John McPhee's essay "The Search for Marvin Gardens" as a model for students to write what he terms the "counterpoint essay."