Authority, Revolution, the GEO, and Halloween Candy

I’ve spent a little time this week wondering whether or not to tell my students about the GEO’s currentstruggle to protect the tuition waivers of graduate students like me. I’ve decided that I will; partly because I’ve been so adamant that they think about and tell one another (and me) what they “give a shit” about (one of our own course blogs is aptly titled “Give a Sh*t”) and I feel compelled to let them in on something I give a shit about, and partly because I want them to be prepared for the possibility that their instructor may be on strike and that they’d be left to their own devices (and my trusty syllabus—good luck! godspeed!). Having seen the way some of my students choose to use unstructured class time, the prospect of these students directing themselves through the remaining weeks of the semester is a little unsettling. In either case, partially what is at stake is my authority (and responsibility) as an instructor, my students’ authority (as learners), and our combined authority and responsibilities as this weird community that the Rhet program has produced.

Explaining the GEO’s current situation has the potential to threaten my authority in the classroom: I implied at the earlier weeks of class that I’d taught this course several times before. I never straight-out lied, but would generally say things like “Students who work on such-and-such an essay in groups, in my experience, tend to earn higher grades on those essays.” The students either don’t catch on that “my experience” in my head and informed by office chatter, or they just don’t care whether or not I’ve done this before. In the more recent weeks, I’ve been letting on a bit more about myself: I’m a student too! I write papers all the time too! Yeah, it is hard! Yeah, citing stuff does kind of suck! It’s a weird meditated position and I can’t quite describe how it affects my authority: does it make me less of an “expert” on writing because I’m kind of like them (sans the taylorsfwifophilia)? They way I’ve framed my classroom is a as a kind of crash-course on thinking like a college student: in that sense I’m (almost) totally comfortable with my authority position. Grad students are supermegadouble college students.

To make a longish blog post longisher, the connection between these thoughts and this week’s reading came in the same portion of Barrows’ essay that Calgary pointed out. What is at stake in using one’s authority as an instructor to “radicalize” one’s students? Is it somehow an abuse of power? Is it redeemed by the fact that I’m asking them to think critically about their institution and its priorities? They’re so excited to be fresh-adults and college students: are they ready to be seen as sources of revenue and to see me as a source of labor?

On the other hand, it’s close to Halloween, so I have an excuse to bring candy to class.

Source: kidtimes.wordpress.com

Barrows, Chief Illiniwek, and checking privilege/assumptions

As I started reading primary source essay drafts last week, I had a couple of people tell me how typical it is for students to zero in on U of I's mascot controversy when they start to work on their semester-long research projects. The colleagues I spoke with were pretty down on this topic and at first I didn't understand why: I had already read one of the two mascot essays I knew my students were writing and I loved it. It fulfilled every aspect of the assignment and was incredibly thoughtful, driven by curiosity and a desire to understand both sides of the issue. Then I read the second essay. This one was not as well-organized and also presented me with a dilemma. The author is one of my favorite students, someone who is always present, alert in class, respectful, easygoing, and clearly eager to do well and produce quality work. But this essay, beyond its structural/organization issues, was plagued with generalizations and assumptions about the opinions of those who oppose the Chief Illinewek mascot. She had grown up admiring “the Chief,” in part because of family ties to the university, and she was upset that she had been robbed of her opportunity to “honor” him. My knee-jerk reaction was to try to change her mind. Immediately. “SHE IS SO SMART AND FUN TO HAVE IN CLASS; I MUST FIX THIS.” But the idea of imposing my own ethics/politics on her also made me uncomfortable: I certainly couldn’t tell her that some of her attitudes about Native Americans and how protest groups “should” react when faced with demeaning/trivializing stereotypes of their cultural heritage felt awfully bigoted and closed-minded to me. Right? As true as they may be, it’s hard to imagine anyone reacting gracefully to accusations like that. And the point is to teach her to write persuasively and to improve on the skills she brought with her to the class. There were organizational issues to deal with, as well as a questionable source with correspondingly faulty analysis, and because of these things, she wasn’t convincing anybody about her stance on the issue, right or wrong. Dealing with those things is my actual job, so how much responsibility should I take on when it comes to issues, however meaningful they are to me, that lay beyond the course's aims?
            The reading this week complicated the question for me, particularly the article by Barrows who asks quite astutely: “when the majority of students I teach assert, in all sincerity, that ‘the rest of the world hates us because we have all the power, riches, celebrities, and sports heroes, and they’re jealous of us,’ how can one not wish to unsettle the arrogance, paranoia, and xenophobia informing such a statement?” This was an attitude I saw in my own student’s paper, particularly in her indignation toward those who sought to deprive her of her beloved mascot. She expressed very little interest in understanding the viewpoints of those who would argue so passionately against the mascot; rather, it was her instinct to dismiss them completely as spoilsports. Barrows’ efforts to adjust some of these attitudes is totally worthwhile to me and I appreciate his approach in the classroom, how he has designed a course with the goal of checking the privilege of a certain "type" of college student: sheltered and spoiled to varying degrees. It’s given me a lot to think about in terms of how I design my next Rhet 105 section, whether or not I can build assignments and exercises into the course that will challenge my students’ preconceptions from the beginning, without jeopardizing their trust in me as in instructor. I feel like there must be a fine line between imposing my belief system on a classroom and challenging them to check their assumptions about race, gender, imperialism, capitalism (and the bounty of other issues in a very long list…). 

image source: http://www.stltoday.com/chief-illiniwek-tattoo/image_8e4a9464-3391-11e0-8bb2-00127992bc8b.html

Once again, I wish I had read that sooner

Source: Cartoonstock.com: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/p/positive_feedback.asp

I could say that about almost every article we have read so far but the Summer Smith article particularly struck me with the notion that my students and I would have benefited from the author's advice before the first paper. Still, I come armed with this knowledge as I finish up (and by finish up I mean actually begin and eventually finish) grading the second unit essay and beyond. In that regard, I'm thankful for procrastination. Anyway, "The Genre of the End Comment" on the one hand, crystallized some vague notions I have had about what not to do and made me aware of some mistakes I have been making in the process of end comments and comments throughout my student's papers.

Some stupid things I have been doing include the fragment. This one is probably the most stupid and pointless (and shame-inducing) as it obviously has no purpose other than functioning as a very small and uncomfortable pillow shielding the student from the hammer blows of constructive criticism. I found myself somewhat urgently looking back through my graded papers and preliminary drafts. There I found, "Good job." "Great point, overall." "Nice work." How about, "Bullshit?" My flagrant fragments are only setting my students up for failure, as I feel they are both vague and arbitrary. Why is it nice work? What is nice about it? What am I even referencing?

Another mistake of which I am now aware is my sticking to the compliment-criticism-compliment sandwich form. It is so tired in so many ways. This end-comment's formula has likely become ingrained into students through high school and in order to more effectively guide students, instructors (in college!) need to try something different --something healthier than a bullshit sandwich. It would certainly catch my attention if an instructor addressed me personally, commented on my successes specifically and examined my (paper's) failures critically but encouragingly.

I was glad to know that some of my techniques seem to be productive. I tend to focus on a paper's specific strengths and weaknesses while not overloading it with comments. I usually tend not to use fragments and I feel as I get to know students better, I will approach praise and criticism more personally. I will say I am not afraid to address some papers more critically than others while not soullessly tearing into students' self-confidence. That's good, I think.

My End Comment for Smith's "The Genre of the End Comment":

She does a lot of things well in her article --clarification of the study, a comprehensive overview of genre, logical conclusions, and definitely made me more aware of my potentially unproductive and even detrimental employment (and internalization) of the conventions of the end-comment genre.

However, I am somewhat unclear as to how comments might effect students. In several footnotes, Smith mentions a study by Claudia Keh concerning students' views of the helpfulness of different comments --however, I feel I would have benefited from more specific examples. Granted, the theories implied in her argument are highly logical and I want to believe them but I cannot help but be somewhat suspicious.

I would also argue that perhaps concluding the end comment with some praise is not always the best strategy even in the coaching genre as seem to be implied (264). I have read another study focusing on managerial practices and often when a co-worker receives constructive criticism followed up by some sort of praise, there is often a tendency to entirely disregard the criticism in favor of the praise. This has to do with a psychological theory based on the observation that we remember the first and the last items in a sequence better than the rest of its content and perhaps this applies to writing and speech as well.

Finally, I am a little reluctant to examine the end-comment outside of its context(s): its situation at the end of a paper full of other comments and perhaps in relationship to other comments on previous drafts of the same paper. There is a tendency to comment less on final drafts than preliminaries, I think.

However, these 'shortcomings' I feel, are just avenues for future research on a fascinating subject of which I was unaware before Smith's interesting piece.

Comp/Rhet, "Integrating international students into society," and assumptions about the college student

My post this week is somewhat tangential to Neal Lerner's article "The Teacher-Student Writing Conference and the Desire for Intimacy," though it is in part informed by the article's portrayal of attitudes towards college freshman taking composition courses. Lerner's article asks us, in part, to think about the kinds of assumptions that have been made (& that we now make) about what our college freshmen look like, what their writing looks like, and surprisingly, how instructor assumptions about their students' upbringings affect the instructors' level of intimacy desired in their instruction. Lerner focuses on enrollment tension points, and attributes these moments of admittance "swelling" to the increased numbers of immigrant and poor, urban students (188). The anxiety over such a diverse group of students and the difficulties that the individuality of writing instruction often demands prompted universities to find ways to offer individualized instruction.

This anxiety echoes throughout the essay:

• Samuel Avery, 1912: "This enormous influx of students has changed the general character of the student body... in the early days practically all college students came from cultured homes, or from homes animated by a burning aspiration for higher things" (188).
• Burges Johnson & Helene Hartley, 1936: composition classes are "flooded with hordes who come from high schools overcrowded with students lacking the background of cultured homes and the tradition of good English speech" (193).
• Neal Lerner describes the post-WWII composition attitude: "The goal was not necessarily to create meaningful relationships with students, but instead to deal with difference in the pattern established during the previous two enrollment tension periods" (196).
• Lester Fisher & Donald Murray, 1973: "[T]he majority of the students were remedial, and they knew it. They were sent to us by their advisers. They feared writing -- they were scientists and agricultural majors, whites and blacks, athletes and wounded veterans; they were the bored, the angry, the apprehensive" (200).

Mourning the loss of the student body marked by "culture;" tradition and language usage; dealing with difference; lists of those on whom writing has turned its back. Finally:

• Laurel Johnson Black, 1998: "Even in liberal classrooms, where difference may not be ignored or repressed but is 'celebrated' in thematic units on diversity, conferences still function to find ways to subordinate the personal experience and language of students to a dominant world view -- the teacher's" (203).

I don't know what to make of this, except to wonder, perhaps naively, if/how I am propagating this anxiety over difference in my own classroom approaches. I see my students struggle with ways of approaching difference, too, as some have decided to write about why international students don't try to befriend "the other students" on campus (I overheard some freshmen talking about wondering how UIUC helps support "integrating international students into society," as if they were ex-cons). How do we conceive of difference in our classroom? What are the markers of difference? Is freshman composition a course that teaches students how to fake coming from a "cultured home" where academic inquiry and "higher things" and "the tradition of good English speech" are valued? Do we help them find their own voice? What does that even mean; what does that look like? When talking with other comp instructors, how do we discuss the perceived mismatches between academic discourses and our students'incoming abilities without ultimately resorting to language that divides, separates, categorizes?

Also, this is funny, and even more tangentially related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LC0JjvAJt8

Teaching and the Student-Teacher Conference

I can't help it! Calvin & Hobbes is always relevant.
Source: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/04/21

While Neal Lerner's article on the student-teacher conference focuses on the usefulness of conferences to the student writer and the varying degrees to which strained resources limit the teacher's time and ability to hold conferences with students frequently, I have to admit that leading up to our RHET student conferences I have been thinking more about the usefulness of these conferences to me as a new teacher. I hope that I will hold conferences that help the students to better understand the requirements of the course, where they are succeeding, and how they can go about improving their writing, but what I am really looking forward to is the chance to improve my teaching based on these conferences.

I have mentioned in seminar already that I am particularly challenged by the difficulty of gauging not just my students' grasp of the concepts we discuss in class, but their level of interest and engagement with it. It is hard to know whether to speed up or slow down when all you have to go on half the time is a sea of blank faces. The few office visits I have had already have been illuminating for me as they have suggested areas for me to focus on in future classes. Written assignments can indicate what a student's writing strengths and weaknesses are,  of course, but a one-on-one conversation invites questions that don't get brought up in class, and provides me as a teacher with a better idea of what needs to be emphasized and expanded on in class. It also provides a testing water for how to go about explaining concepts in ways that are readily understood. In a one-on-one conference I find myself rewording my points far more than in a classroom discussion, and I get a much better sense of what needs to be reworded and repeated, as well as which rewordings are understood. Is it too optimistic to think that after one-on-one meetings with all 19 of my students I will have a better understanding of how to approach full-class discussions in a more productive way for everyone? Or does having just one session of conferences mean that in a few weeks I'll be back where I started, staring a sea of blank faces trying to gauge how they're coping with a new concept and new assignment?

One thing that Lerner doesn't discuss in his article is the actual content of student-teacher conferences, and I wonder to what extent the content and focus of conferences do – or should – change depending on the frequency of occurrence. If we had a conference for each assignment, for example, it makes sense to focus primarily on the work the student is currently producing. But if I want my once-semesterly conference to benefit both me and the student for the rest of the semester, how do I tailor it to do so? Is that even possible? Indeed, to what extent should I be tailoring it, when this is the student's opportunity to ask the questions that he or she may not otherwise do?

Conferencing...

"Composition is a subject best discussed in quiet rooms" (In honor of tonight's debate)

I feel depressed after reading the Learner article, which could be summarized as such: For over 100 years, educators have acknowledged the crucial role of individualized instruction, yet have continually failed to arrive upon an effective method of implementation. I see no solutions on the horizon either. I imagine Learner, whose article was published prior to the 2008 economic collapse and the ensuing austerity measures, would only conclude with greater pessimism if his analysis was extended to the present; after all, this "has always been a case of too many students, too little time, too much writing, too few dollars." As humanities departments continue to be starved, the current unsustainable trajectory seems to be more students, less time (for instructors), and less dollars.

To me, any attempt to foster improved instructor-student relations in freshman composition classes is futile within the corporatized university. The lack of satisfying individual instruction is obviously a symptom of a problem far beyond the agency of english graduate teaching instructors, who, facing a job market that is both squeezed dry and stuck in the glory days mentality of research>teaching ability, must focus on their own work.

A separate issue: how much would it even benefit a student to regularly conference with a rookie teacher, completely inexperienced in the world of rhet/comp? In the semester that my students are supposed to be learning how to write, their guide is a do-it-yourself etext and an "instructor" that doesn't know what material is going to be covered in class more than a week in advance. Would they really improve drastically as writers if they spent more time with me? The individual contact I have had with my students has filled me with guilt: "am I giving them bad advice?" We did get five days of orientation, so we know what we're doing I guess (I kid). I shouldn't be so cynical as the individual instruction I have given my students so far has gone pretty well. I've just felt like I don't have the authority to be giving the advice I am giving, and I fear that they are taking the words of an amateur as gospel. 

Something else that interested me in the article was the resistance over the years to science and technology. Learner touches on the reliance on computerized work, and also, in response to Glicksberg's quotes, states: "The chilling, soulless world of the scientist needed to be countered by the humanistic methods of the English teacher and, specifically, through the understanding of students as individuals." I wonder how much room there is for individualism and humanism in a prefabricated e-class that strongly discourages the use of any literature. I say this as a student who switched his major from Business to English after reading literature in my freshman composition class in undergrad. It was refreshing to read the words of Charles Glickensberg in response to the encroachment of the sciences on the humanities:

"The scientific Huns are on the march, and their objective is not only the elimination of English composition from the curriculum. If they had their way, they would sack the buildings in which the liberal arts are taught, raze them to the ground, and pour salt on the foundation. The new scientific barbarians, now that they have produced the atomic bomb, are determined to capture the citadel of education, adapt it to their own special ends, and establish a dictatorship of the physicists and technocrats."

About Conferencing...

(instead of a megaphone substitute chalk)

I have to admit that I feel both relieved and unsure about my own teaching practices after having read Neal Lerner’s article on conferencing. This is largely owing to my assumption that all of my teachers/professors have a rationale for setting up their classes and conferences the way they have but Lerner’s essay reveals to me that these rationales are based more on working with limited resources than what is in the best interest for the student. This balancing act in turn effects our own perceptions of what teaching is as opposed to what we wish it could be.
    Personally, as a new T.A. the words of George Herbert Locke resonated with me; this idea that we long to offer students “direct, personal, and often intimate intercourse with professors (or T.A.’s) of maturity and human sympathy”. I won’t speak for everyone but I know that I have always wanted to set up my course in such a way that I can become acquainted with each individual student, determine their proficiency level, and proceed to tailor instruction to meet their needs, all while maintaining a personal and respectful relationships. In other words, I fancied myself as heir to the role of Mr. Feeney (minus the creepy living next to my students and following them through life part). This of course presupposes an abundance of resources, the most important of which is time. As a T.A. I have 18 students, which may not sound like much, but getting to know them personally as well as where their proficiency levels are at in order to tailor instruction can be daunting, if not altogether impossible. Not to mention that I also have my own course work to attend to and (GASP!) a social life to maintain.
    The article points to multiple “tension points” in American universities with regards to enrollment and the subsequent strategies (conferencing, writing lab/workshop, peer tutoring, etc.) that emerged to deal with the “hordes who come from high schools…lacking the background of cultured homes and the tradition of good English speech”, as Burges Johnson and Helene Hartley so eloquently observe. In general I agree with Johnson and Hartley in that it appears as though students are coming to college with lower writing proficiencies (I won’t label them as culture deficient hordes though) and that it seems unfair/unrealistic that the responsibility of bringing their writing skills up to par should fall solely on the shoulders of an instructor that will usually only have them for one semester. How much can be achieved in one semester? To this I would say, “As little or as much as the student wants”. With all of the aforementioned strategies/tools available it seems to me perfectly possible that a student could significantly improve their skills. If students could only analyze what their own shortcomings were regarding writing and seek to improve them we instructors could go about helping them succeed. In this way conferences would be very beneficial; even if students did not have the vocabulary to voice their issues in a one on one conference these issues can be overcome, but of course all of this is predicated on student effort. Unfortunately, rhetoric courses are not on the top of the interest list for most of our student body who would rather focus on their science courses. Bearing all of this in mind I think am most in agreement with Donald Murray in that “his teaching role is even less active and much more a mirror for students to see their intent, their needs, their problems.” At the very least after having read this article I don't feel bad about not being able to hold 18 hands at the same time.

Lerner, Neal. "The Teacher-Student Writing Conference and the Desire for Imtimacy." College English 68.2 (2005): 186-208. Web