Category: Teaching

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Catching up on some links and other readings

A bit of a miscellaneous post here, more or less trying to catch up on readings and stuff to come back to:

  • From the NYTimes Lens blog, “Chop and Crop,” which is a complaint by photographer David Hume Kennerly about how Newsweek reframed/reworked a photo he took of Dick Chenney.  Basically, the original photo was a family picture of the Chenneys where Dick was cutting up a hunk of roast or some other sort of beef.  The re-cropped photo,which appeared in Newsweek and accompanied a quote from Chenney about torture and such, zooms in on Chenney cutting up bloody meat.  An extensive and interesting discussion, too.
  • “Is the Internet Melting our Brains?” is an interview in Salon with Dennis Baron about his book, A Better Pencil.  Spoiler alert:  Baron’s answer appears to be “no.”
  • Here and here, Henry Jenkins has a long interview with S. Craig Watkins about social media (especially Facebook) and about his book The Young and the Digital. Just skimming through the interview (which is in itself enough of a text to include in a class, especially something like 516 or 444), it seems like Watkins’ analysis is pretty interesting.  Say, speaking of stuff like Facebook:
  • The John Seely Brown Symposium at U of M on October 13 is going to feature an open to the public speech and panel presentation with danah boyd as the keynote speaker.  I think I’m going to let my 12:30 class out early and head on over there.
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Oh, you almost had me again, Stanley

There’s a kind of curious entry/article on Stanley Fish’s New York Times “blog,” “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 2,” which is about writing instruction and which picks up on his previous article, which I blogged about here. I posted a response on the NYTimes site, but since I have no idea if it will appear there or not, I thought I’d just post it here:

I have to say this seems more of a “revision” of your previous post and less a “response.”  After all, in part one of this series, you seemed to be all for a traditional view of teaching grammar and rhetoric:  you cited the conservative organization the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and you did write “I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”  Now you are saying that it is “of course” nonsense to teach grammar out of context.  But as I am sure you are aware, most administrators, the ACTA, and “people on the street” would interpret the phrase “teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else” as “teach grammar out of context.”

Be that as it may, I agree with your revision, more or less, though I would argue that form in writing various depending on purpose and audience.  This is why it is is important that universities are pushing more toward writing within disciplines while simultaneously acknowledging that writing is a field/discipline that itself has content and a purpose.  This is why departments separate from “English” have emerged at many colleges and universities.

But what I still see missing in your response/revision is addressing the issue of “the kids today.”  The way I read it, you were pointing to anecdotal evidence that college students writing skills were getting worse to support your criticism of “the composition establishment.”  This sentiment was certainly echoed in many of the comments, where writers agreed with you that the students today do not write nearly as well as the students of the past.

So, I was wondering what you make of the Stanford Study on Writing, which has received some (albeit more modest) attention recently.  The basic argument of Andrea Lunsford and its other researchers is that the youth of today write in more places and for more purposes than they ever have before.  Lunsford goes so far as to say “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.”  This is a lofty claim for sure, but it does appear to be based on actual research, not unlike the Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer article you cite here.

Have you revised/revisited your impression of the sorry state of today’s college writers?  Or is that too part of your response/revision here?

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Student writing is getting worse– or wait, it’s getting better!

Ladies and gentlemen:  It is time for the main event, the forever battle over students getting worse and worse as time goes on.  Let’s get ready to

RRRRUUUUUUMMMMMMBBBBBBBLLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!!!

Representing the world champion, the “going to hell in a hand-basket,” the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish’s “What Should Colleges Teach?” on his New York Times “blog.” Judging by the many comments here that repeat “oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be,” he’s clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn’t he be?  Isn’t it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both “better” than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today’s grown-ups) were also better than the current youth (“When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now…”).

In the challenger’s corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article “The New Literacy,” in which he argues that “it’s not that today’s students can’t write.  It’s that they’re doing it in different places and in different ways.”  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let’s see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

Fish opens with what he even admits is a pretty old attack:  the problem is that composition classes in college don’t teach the craft of writing, and they instead teach something– well, something else.  Political stuff.  Saving the world.  Not writing and grammar and rhetoric.  “As I learned more about the world of composition studies,” Fish writes, “I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.”  Those bastards in composition!!

Thompson’s opening anticipates and parries this old attack: “As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?” Right. Oh wait, the idea that the kids can’t write isn’t right? Perhaps we will read on….

Fish argues that his position now has “received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.”  What could possibly be wrong with these folks?

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure college and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

Ouch.  Having a right-wing group supporting your position on education is always a little, um, uncomfortable.  What have you got, Thompson?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Ah-HA!  One of those evil compositionalists!  Of course she is saying this! The problem is though that Lunsford actually uses this stuff that academics like Fish and Cheney are supposed to respect, this stuff– oh, what’s it called?  right!  Actual research with actual student writers.

I think the thing that Fish gets most wrong is to assume that somehow, it is even possible to teach “grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.”  Grammar and rhetoric are always about something; you can’t just teach rules are about how to persuade and not have some kind of content.  And I think where Thompson and the Stanford study get it most right is to recognize that students (and everyone else) need to write with some kind of purpose and for some kind of audience, and they do this often in out of school settings, like Facebook and blogs and Twitter:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This fight ends sort of  like the first Rocky, I am sure:  the upstart still loses.  But who knows?  Maybe after a dozen sequels, we’ll finally get a round where the good guys win.

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Teaching online and how I warn students

A student I had in English 444 online this summer and who I will be having in English 505 online this fall noticed that the warning message I send around to students before the class begins is more or less boiler-plate. This is true, and I was also reminded that a couple of different faculty colleagues have asked me for that warning.  So, in the spirit of sharing, I offer (after the jump) the email that I send to students before the class begins to warn them about what it is they are getting themselves into.

A couple of thoughts/caveats:

  • Feel free to borrow/modify from this for your own teaching, though if it makes sense to give me some credit, that’d be okay.
  • I see this as mostly a “buyer beware” sort of message, but the origins of this message are frustration.  When I started teaching online several years ago, I had a couple of students who wrote to me in email messages “I’m not very good with computers.”   I found this rather frustrating; why, I asked these students, would you sign up for a class where the main interaction involved a computer?
  • Has this message “worked?”  Yes and no.  Mostly “Yes” because some students receive this message and decide that the class might not be right for them, which I take as a success.  I’d rather have students recognize that the online class is not for them and not get into in the first place than have to withdraw when they can’t get their money back.  And I’d say “Yes” in that when students do get in over their heads, they do know that they had been warned.  But “No” in that I still have students who either don’t take my warnings seriously or who over-estimate their technical abilities or time-management skills (though fewer than before).
  • I ask students to respond to this message, and what’s interesting to me is that students who have had online classes before generally seem to appreciate it the most.

Okay, to the message itself:

Continue reading “Teaching online and how I warn students”

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Some artists are just kinda wrong

From the blog Livin’ it Up Big Time comes this entry, “Looks Like If The Words Are Bleeding (Collected Collegiate Student Essays, 2002-2009).” This popped up on the WPA-L mailing list.  Basically, the blogger/artist Theodore Diran Lyons III took some particularly poor examples of writing assignments he had collected from seven years of teaching at different institutions, tacked them up on the wall, circled some of the errors in red and highlighted other errors with large font pull-quotes, and said it was an art piece about illiteracy in America.  Comments on his blog ensued, and I am apart of the thread as the long-winded “Steve,” if you’re curious.

I don’t know, perhaps I was giving the guy far too much grief/far too much attention here, but I got sucked in.  The whole conversation bothers/bothered me.  This is certainly an example of the sort of feedback loop I’ve experienced/written about in terms of blog writing and viral media.  I guess I also think it’s interesting the extent to which we reached an impasse regarding the definition of illiteracy (which is obviously more complicated than mistakes circled in red), and the extent to which Lyons is so defensive about all this.  Oh well; I guess we all have a way of being defensive, eh?

I think one of the key differences of opinion is the idea about what counts as a “fair game” object of art or public discussion.  Lyons wants to claim that artists can claim pretty much anything.  In his way of thinking about it, the students abandoned these essays (they didn’t pick up them up at the end of the term), so they were his to do with as he pleased.  I think that when we ask students to write things, it is uncool to turn around and then use those things in our own work.  For example, it would be problematic for me to lift chunks of text from one or more of my students’ essays and then claim it as my own (though we’ve all heard stories of this happening before).  And it is clearly and completely wrong for teachers to use a public forum– a blog, an art gallery, both, etc.– to make fun of students’ failings.

I suppose it’s different here since Lyons isn’t exactly presenting this work as his own and he did work to conceal the identities of his “illiterate” students; but he is using his students’ work, unbeknownst to them, in an attempt to make a point.  And in my way of looking at it, he is using his students’ work to more or less demonstrate that they are not very smart and to make fun of them.

That’s just mean.

It also seems to me that the more successful of this mode of found/quasi-performance art uses as the subject/victim the artist himself.  I’m thinking of people like Chris Burden, who nailed himself (well, someone else obviously must have done the nailing) to the back of Volkswagen and who was shot by an assistant as art.  Think what you will of Burden’s art, but in these pieces, at least he is the object/victim.  In contrast, Lyons’ piece victimizes his students.  Granted, we’re talking about abandoned writing assignments here and not truly life-threatening acts/art, but these students are victims of a sort nonetheless.

For me, a more interesting piece might have involved Lyons tacking up some of the student evaluations he has collected over the years on a big wall in some sort of pattern.  Maybe there are reoccurring comments from students he could circle?  Maybe he could note the ways he himself has progressed as a teacher?  Maybe he could note the mistakes he continues to make?  Lord knows that’s a piece I could put together.

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Misc. thoughts from “Up-North”

I’m sitting here in Traverse City on the patio of my hotel writing this post.  I’ve got somewhat dicey internet access, and there is a fair amount of bird shit on the patio because of a nest that is in the eaves above.  Across the way, there’s a fenced-in small herd (10 or so?) of buffalo.  Somewhat close to nature, I suppose.  Will is watching Spongebob while playing computer games, and Annette is reading and napping.  Somewhat close to home, too.

We’re up here because I’m teaching a course called Technology for Teaching and Learning, which is offered as part of the EMU continuing ed program in Traverse City.  Basically, my concept of the class has been as a hands-on course/workshop that runs from 8-ish in the morning until 2-ish in the afternoon for a week.  The focus is on exposure to all sorts of tools (mostly of the web 2.0 variety) with the goal of helping folks figure out how various things might (or not) work in their teaching.  It’s a lot of practice that hopefully sparks some theory.  I originally imagined it as an English/Writing course, but all but one of the eight students have come from other programs and they are all grad students, too.  It’s been a lot of fun and useful for students (I think), and the format has worked out pretty much the way that I hoped:  lots of time to really try to figure out some of this software, lots of time to talk and brainstorm about what might work, lots of time to “bond” with each other.  Anyway, check out the web site above.

As part of the deal, EMU puts faculty up in a local hotel, and in our case, we selected the option of the Great Wolf Lodge. Check out the web site for those not familiar; basically, it is a hotel with a waterpark, or a waterpark with a hotel.  As Annette put it, staying here is a bit like staying in a Chuck E. Cheese:  everything is set up for the 12 and under crowd (and parents, of course) for a one or two night stay (the desk clerk expressed surprise at my eight day reservation) of waterpark fun, story-time, ice cream, arcade games, some sort of weird Harry Potter-esque game in the hallways that involve kids playing with wands.  Don’t ask because that’s all I know.  Mind you, it’s a decent-enough hotel.  Everyone has been quite nice, and, relatively speaking, it is pretty conveniently located, especially to get to the points east of here that are of touristy interest.  But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t on EMU’s dime.

While I’ve been teaching, Annette and Will have been touring about, taking advantage of the waterpark, and just generally hanging about.  When you’re up north this long, you don’t feel as much pressure to do something all the time.  So far, we’ve been up to Leeland (Fishtown and the Bluebird), Glen Arbor (and Cherry Republic), Sleeping Bear, Empire Beach, downtown Traverse City, and a few points in-between.  We’re thinking about going up to Petoskey on Saturday.  Whenever I come up here, I always have two reoccuring thoughts:  first, it sure is beautiful up here and I understand the appeal of a sorta run-down cabin down a gravel lane by the lake. Conversely, it reminds me of how it is a lot more fun to visit a tourist town than to live in a tourist town.  The traffic around here, especially in the “city” of Traverse City: jesh.

Anyway, some pictures/movies soon, including of the bird shit, birds, and buffalo.