Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Beyond the red pen

Notes for a presentation about using blogs to respond to student writing

My history as a blogger. I started blogging in 2004, with only the faintest idea what a blog was, in order to play around with  some technology new to me and hoping to be able to use my blog to collect up reflections about my teaching and notes on some things I'd been reading. (Here's a post from earlier this year, for example, where I play around a bit.) Before long I was starting to appreciate the power of blogs to connect to other people interested in teaching writing. As I started posting comments on other people's blogs and adding the blogs I liked to my blogroll, I started to get a few people reading my blog; I was astonished by how excited this made me and how much it motivated me to keep writing. I started contributing to the group blog Community College English, which I now run, and I started wondering if I could use blogs in my classes to give my students the same excitement, motivation, and connection.

My history as a teacher. When I started teaching (several decades ago), each semester my students would read four novels, write eight essays, and work their way through a 200-odd page grammar book that had them diagram and then write their own compound-complex sentences featuring various combinations of gerund, infinitive, and participial phrases. My job was to mark and count Major Usage Errors (we called them MUE's), which included fragments or run-on sentences, homonym errors, wrong verb forms, or pronoun or verb agreement problems. 3 MUE's meant an F on an essay. That was department policy, and essay sets were collected from us graduate assistants to make sure we adhered to this rule.

It bothers me that my students now have so many problems writing error-free paragraphs (let alone essays), but I have more important things to teach them. Out of habit, sometimes, my pen still moves to circle misspellings and check-mark sentence boundary issues, but I groan when my students say they have "corrected" a rough draft by "fixing the mistakes" I marked. I wonder if blogs could help to break both me and my students out of this misplaced emphasis on error.

How it works. 

• I set up a course blog, where I post the course syllabus, essay and reading assignments, links to online resources.
• I arrange to bring students into a computer lab on campus where I show them how to set up their own blogs. (This semester I'm using blogger; I've also used wordpress and edublogs.)
• Students give me their blogs' URL's, which I then post onto sidebar of course blog, separated by classes. Students are encouraged to browse and read others' essays.
• I give instructions for peer review (see here and here) and group students into pairs or trios (assigned after they have posted their drafts).
• I comment on rough drafts, moving back and forth between two open windows set up like this: Download Twowindows. 

Sample peer and instructor response. See Kristen and Lauren's blogs.

Other suggestions/options.

The commentpress template available in edublogs allows a reviewer to attach comments to specific paragraphs (for example, here). Students found this blogging software a little more difficult to use than blogger, and I found myself tempted, as you can see from the linked example, perhaps to "overmark" essays, esp. for style issues. (Maybe more appropriate for higher level courses?) 

In addition to asking students to post drafts, I've also used blogs for prewriting "trial run" of subjects, allowing me to give feedback on topic selection, an issue whose importance is significantly under-appreciated by many students, and for post-writing reflection on revision process (other reflective topics possible as well).

Potential advantages (especially) for portfolio students.

• deepening their sense of audience
• allowing time for more thoughtful responses to the work of their peers
• prompting them to consider criteria for evaluation as they measure their work against the work of others
•  fostering more frequent and more substantive revision
• helping to develop awareness of their own writing processes
• on a practical level, helping to keep work organized and accessible (and backed-up)

Difficulties and complaints (cited by approx. 20% of students in survey last week)

• student resistance to technology and, more significantly, problems with Internet access
• student reluctance to make work public
• student sense that this is more time-consuming

For additional resources, click here.

Writing teacher writing

In the past few months, as I've been trying to figure out how to carve out more time for my own writing,  relevant articles and passages have been dropping from the sky. First someone slipped into my mailbox a NISOD Innovation Abstracts sheet, Stephen A. Catrello's "Practicing What You Teach". He recounts, when he was an adjunct, bringing in samples from his technical editing "real job," both to show his students real-world writing and to let them see him as a fellow writer. Later, when he landed his full-time gig, he wrote the narrative essay assignment along with his students, emphasizing the value of their seeing his process and his struggles (and successes presumably).

I often have thought about doing assignments along with my students, but hadn't  found the time until this semester (although I do generally talk about how I'd approach the assignment and toss out some of my conceptual-art-essays).

Warning: digression ahead. Which makes me think about the essay-of-the-mind (to echo Wallace Stevens' "On Modern Poetry"). I'm not sure whether it's an occupational hazard or my natural habits of procrastination (probably both), but I find myself with a sizable collection of ghost-essays, germs of ideas floating around in my head or at most scribbled onto some back-of-an-envelope to-write list , but not yet fleshed out into actual words. It's a dangerous practice, I'm afraid, for several reasons.

• It's too easy for the concepts in my mind to seem clever, insightful, poignant so that it's with stomach-churning disappointment that I see them lying there lifeless when finally captured on paper. Hypothesis: the longer the ghost-essays wander around my head before venturing out to test the air the more painful the disillusionment. Learning to tolerate this pain is (one) key to overcoming writers' block, which is a serious problem for so many of my students. The idea, of course, is to convince them that Revision will come riding to the rescue on that cliched White Horse.
• The other important thing, for me to remember and for students to understand, is that in the process of putting down these ideas on paper brings up more ideas. As the mathematicians say, this is a nontrivial statement.

Not again to the lake?!! (or, Selecting essays for FYC)

In trying to decide which essays to use in my comp classes this semester, paging through the stacks of texts sent out by publishers, I was struck by an amazing coincidence: Why is it that, of all the narrative essays in the English-speaking world, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" show up over and over and over again? (Judy Brady's "I Need a Wife" seems to me somewhat over-represented as well as the proto-definition essay...) I pulled out White's essay for a closer look. Now, I know I'm supposed to revere him as a stylist (and I am fond of Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style), but that particular essay, for me, reeks of musty Reader's Digest condensed books and damp mass market mysteries, conjures the feel of scratchy blankets and two too-many days without a hot shower. So, rather than actually buckling down and committing to a half-dozen essays or so I'd use in my classes, I instead started one of my meta-musings about the process. I've written before about why to use reading of external texts in FYC; now I've been thinking more specifically about how I do (or should) choose the particular pieces I assign my students.

As I started in, thinking about why and why not for particular essays, I paired in my mind White's "Once More to the Lake" with another essay I'd assigned for a few semesters, then discarded, Michael Pollan's essay "Why Mow? The Case against Lawns."  Why Pollan, and this essay in particular? Well, I own all four of his books (though I haven't had time to read The Omnivore's Dilemma yet); I admire his style; I'm interested in his subjects. Grass seemed to me initially a universal topic, and I'm partial to essays that invite the reader to take a new look at something he may have taken for granted. Though I've pushed a lawn mower  only a few yards in my life (my parents expected me, as a girl, to do well in math and science, but lawn mowing and garbage disposing were not among my childhood chores), the subject evoked memories: running and scuffing my bare feet through newly cut grass as my father finished up his twilight mowing; the college bio-sci librarian in town who planted his lawn over to wildflowers, forcing his neighbors to examine the prejudices of their own lawn-aesthetic (nice in theory but not next to my shorn grass); my husband's childhood neighborhood, where grass measuring over 2.7 inches tall resulted in grumbling over the hedges and, in short order, the imposition of  fines for civic irresponsibility. Beyond the personal resonances, I had things to say about the essay from a writing teacher perspective (notice his tactic with the lead, his seamless integration of sources, how the structure of his argument is built from blocks of description and narration and comparison/contrast). The thing that got me though, looking out at the faces of my actual students, many of them lower income, first generation American, first generation college students, was wondering how many of them had lawns or the experience of mowing lawns. I'm not sure how relevant that is or should be in choosing to discuss the essay (surely unfamiliarity alone is not sufficient grounds for excluding an essay from consideration), but the consciousness of class that the essay raised was uncomfortable for me. I'm still not quite sure what to do with those feelings, but for now I haven't been using that essay.

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)

Rethinking themes

At last month's final I asked my students (4 classes of FYC) for feedback on the theme-based class they'd just sat through: did they find a course theme confining or liberating (though liberating wasn't really the best word--I meant something more like generative). The theme of technology had seemed to me wide open with possibility. I tried to convince them that technology cuts across so many aspects of society, from politics to medicine, communication to the environment, education to commerce. Surely, I thought, they could look at technology's impact in several arenas they were already interested in, sports, say, or music (or maybe they could get curious about something unfamiliar!) But as the semester progressed, the air seemed to suck out of the room in the face of student resistance and, in some cases, downright hostility to my carefully considered theme. So at my minimal-stakes final I wanted to probe a bit to try to see how widespread was the dissatisfaction (on the theory that perhaps the most unhappy were the most vocal) and to try to classify the reasons behind it.

I tallied responses as positive, fence-sitting, or negative (admittedly not a perfectly designed way to collect data, on signed final exams) and found a roughly even split between the three camps. My next step was to try to categorize the critical comments, which not only raised a lot of questions for me about the advantages/disadvantages of this sort of course design but also made me consider what I (maybe?) should have explained to students about why I'd chosen that design (and the more general question of how transparent to make this whole process).

Freedom of expression

In a discussion a few weeks ago, in response to my ramblings about how I've guided/assigned subjects for student essays, a colleague observed that I seemed to want to give my students a lot of freedom, but that freedom is not necessarily something that students welcome in assignments. Since then I've been mulling over some of the issues related to this business of whether and how to assign essay topics, what my observations have been about how students handle varying degrees of restriction, what assumptions underlie my (or others') decisions, what questions the whole issue raises. In other words, yet again, the whole ball of wax--

which made me wonder if I was accurate in picturing that wax ball like a ball of yarn, the sticky wick pulled from an endless candle and wrapped into a rough sphere, or was the ball rather more like the elephant ball we used in gym class, almost too large to wrap your arms around. I googled the phrase, expecting to find Shakespeare but learning instead, according to my I'm-not-sure-how-authoritative source, that its first verified citation was in 1959. Which made me yet again appreciate my librarian-mother's practice, when I was growing up, of sending one of us, mid-dinner, off for a dictionary or her favorite Bartlett's Quotations to check on some disputed bit of etymology or definition or citation. I imagine that few of my students experienced such dinnertimes. And now when my mother comes across an unfamiliar word, she says with always the same tone, half quizzical half girlish anticipation of my praise, The word is a little--is the right word--"esoteric?"

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.

The problem of rhetorical modes

Majority opinion seems to hold that teaching composition MEANS teaching the rhetorical modes; that certainly is what everybody did when I was a graduate student in the early 1980s. But I have read entirely too many place descriptions about teenage bedrooms, process essays about how to change a tire, narratives about car accidents (or, for the more nostalgic, high school proms and graduation ceremonies), contrasts of high school vs college, definitions of success, and research papers about abortion, the disease of the month, or the death penalty.

I'm not sure to what degree (if any) there's a causal relationship between teaching rhetorical modes and students selecting such deadly dull topics. Or is the problem that students, for the most part, seem to have difficulty handling personal topics (either because they haven't acquired the necessary perspective or they can't summon up the telling details of their lives)? The old form vs content debate.