Testing to the Teach
Teaching Narrative, Fall '15.

This year had me teaching a wide variety of courses and covering a great deal of terrain, both physical and figurative. Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric courses, coupled with the companion course Research, Writing, and Rhetoric, were the staples. I contiguously taught a hybrid English Composition for Teachers course in Corbin based both on composition teaching theory and contemporary popular essays. This year I taught two writing intensive classes, and having never taught a W course before, I was challenged to integrate World Literature, Enjoying Literature, and the requirements of the Writing Intensive courses.

All instruction with Eastern went smoothly and as planned, likely because the “first-year” composition courses are salty staples of my teaching history--and the pitfalls are known and avoidable. Composition remains a pleasure, while the literature theory course is presenting the usual difficulties in managing a mountain of course material and writing – with the accompanying reward of obvious improvements on the upper-classmen's writing. My two 200-level classes together renewed my excitement for literature (rather than articles) in teaching humanities, and the smaller classes were a welcome change for grading—though the smaller sample for grading, even grading quizzes, was a problem I had never had to judge in teaching in the past. Teaching Advanced Composition, then Advanced Composition for Teachers was a welcome dalliance and a strong chance to bring my knowledge base for composition theory up to date. 

 

My greatest personal personal challenge for the year was moving to Richmond with my wife Ella and baby Alexander, which we only narrowly accomplished before the beginning of the semester. We are thoroughly enjoying our (fixable) new home and our proximity to campus, and my students seem to much appreciate my availability outside office hours.

My teaching evaluations were returned for both semesters, and in several cases IDEA forms were required for courses each semester. The reviews were generally favorable. The aggregate scores on the IDEA synopsis forms were a 4.9 and a 4.8, respectively, out of 5, and I found that the reviewers answered the questions in much the way I would have across the board. They noted the shortcomings of the classes, of the syllabi, the course schedules, and the timbre of the class – that is, the way the intellectual current was running in the room. The overall impression is that students appreciated the close attention to ideas and the careful review of their own writing, and that we had a good rapport as fellow scholars, but that they were sometimes snowed by material or rushed into deadlines.

In collusion with Adam Hisel and Christina Lovin, I reviewed essays from the writing-intensive World Literature II classes, theirs and mine. The formats of the classes were very different, as one instructor requires a single, longer literary analysis for the class and gives more exams, while another requires many essays a few exams. My own class had three mid-length essays, which could be called a literary analysis, a comparative “local” analysis, and a comparative “global” analysis. After some reading, we were able to mutually conclude that the writing assignments in the 200-level courses, the world literature courses, and the writing-intensive courses could collectively be tailored differently: students seem to need full direction in producing essays consistent with academic discourse conventions, but they also need instruction in innovation, and conjectural thinking in order to produce meaningful writing. Said shorter, they should be taught carefully to write to the task while being also strongly encouraged to deepen and broaden their thinking – or, as a rhetorician would put it, to use the controlling ideas to show how the essay will think. Of those three sections, mine were the students whose thinking could use some assistance with climbing back in the box, or at least curtailing the wildest of the correlative impulses, and more direction in the “assertion, evidence, interpretation” model of literary criticism.

In fall 2015, I am teaching a single 101 course, two 102s, a 210W, and a 302. This is my first year teaching 101 with Language Awareness, and its approach is a complete departure from the texts chosen by the department in past years. It requires almost no reading and offers almost no advice for rhetoric, but it does take students through the writing process in ways that our past texts did not. The result so far is that the students have difficulty choosing subjects for writing and are much more concerned about topic selection than about expressing their own ideas—however, they have three more major essay assignments this semester for which we can temper those expectations. The students in this night class are festive but comparatively inattentive, and they require more classroom management than I am accustomed to giving. They are writing well, however, and paying close attention to their drafts, now that they have learned I will scrutinize their ideas early in their writing. The Composition I class was exceptionally rowdy, which made for difficult short lectures but also for engaging discussion. This is one of the best types of class for my teaching style. Two out of the three 102 classes were quite ready to discuss our many essays, though they were less interested in discussing their own researching and writing. The third 102 class was only slightly less eager.

The four research writing 102s have used the short edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing, and like the new 101 text, it includes few essays, no articles, and much advice on prewriting and editing, with much less emphasis on the process of writing or even ideation. The students therefore rely on the production of their own texts for education, which entails more use of documents on the projector for live editing and for short lectures rather than discussions. It is nearly impossible to lead a discussion without rhetorica, so we rely on examples of secondary texts instead of the primary texts we used in past years. All this translates into editing and composing instruction for the students and much advice on writing, rather than philosophizing and argumentation.

ENG 301 was a first-time course for me, and nearly all the students preferred to temper their creative writing and comment on the academic articles, rather than discuss the Best American Essays in class and perform academic argumentation, as I had imagined they would. This made our midterm and final interesting, because they were required to apply academic tropes to recent, popular essays, both in the short essays they wrote and in short-answer questions. We did use two textbooks for the course, one creative and one academic, each of which was its own kind of success. Every student's writing improved measurably during the semester, and several students in this section were among the best writers I've ever had in class the day walked in.

ENG 303 was full of strong readers and writers who were rather excited about revision. Nearly every student was willing to share thoughts on every short essay. Were I to have the semester over again, though, I would have required reaction, reflection, and response pieces of the 303, then had the students to build those into a critique as an additional MEA. Their “classroom personality” was remarkably taciturn, particularly considering that every student was an elementary education major, and I assumed that their loquaciousness would run the class material out of town on a rail – instead, they demanded lecture, direction, and a militaristic outline of expectations, even at the end of the semester. It seemed they had never been presented with academic articles before, and they needed considerable decoding in order to discuss the works meaningfully.

ENG 302 will have a restructuring the next time I teach it. In several attempts to convey a history of literature while teaching a serviceable survey of critical literature theory, I have reached the unsurprising conclusion that the two cannot be addressed in one semester. The textbook also relies heavily on poetry, and while that works up through Romanticism, poetry becomes a disjointed analogy for literature thereafter. The students take well to the literature in the course, but they actually love the discussions of theory, tropes, and social trends as represented by short stories, heroes, protests, the fragmenting of the narrative in the Modern, the fracture of consciousness in Postmodernism, and even the wry, arch reductionism in Deconstruction. In the future I believe we will take apart a single poem every week, have a pair of axial novels for the course, spend much more of our time on the history of criticism.

The class schedule remains five days a week, and essay grading tends to take all night, at least half the nights of the week, but I believe my students received quality instruction and attention to their writing both semesters.

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What I have learned this semester in my blog is that it is more important than ever that my students enter into dialogue in their academic writing and also in the classroom. In order to get them to enter into the writing dialogue, they must enter it in the classroom as well. I know this partly by the looks on their faces. I have learned that those individuals who are not comfortable speaking in class are probably still thinking. Furthermore, they are worried about not speaking in class—they are waiting for me to fill up that airspace so that they don’t have to. I have learned that they may be deathly afraid of being called on. That even the students who are eager to speak would probably rather hear other students speak more of the time, so that they can learn from other students as they are expected to learn from me.

I learned that it is no accident that composition has moved from the sole focus of university studies to a basic knowledge students are expected to have attained somewhere between the end of high school and the end of English 101. With the help of all the members of our class, I’ve thought a great deal about the kinds of assignments that can get all of us, teachers included, to wrap our minds around visual rhetoric, from design and execution to interpretation. I’ve used versions of several of our activities in class this semester, with degrees of success that indicate both the success of our 609 classmates’ strategies and also the high level of involvement that a graduate class encourages.

My own focus this semester has been in grading strategies through fairer rubrics and in more effective peer editing sessions for students. This week’s much-commented post in the KY Kernel Opinion section. It’s linked here:
http://kykernel.com/2011/11/30/uk%E2%80%99s-writing-center-could-be-more-helpful/

An employee of one writing center attacked the other writing center’s aloof tutors and short sessions. The author, Amanda Powell, claimed that the writing center didn’t have enough time to edit her essay. The most recent post was today, from screen name “SurrealWorld,” and I’ll excerpt it here:
“Also, the term editing has different connotations for undergrads than it does for those in the writing field. Thirty minutes is not enough time to delve into deeper writing issues. Heck, it probably isn’t enough time to simply edit, even editing as writers understand the term.”

This is one of the better responses yet, because it addresses the most glaring issue the comments raised: The comments said largely that writing centers cannot edit, because uncredited editing is plagiarism.

I believe that rebuttal needs some serious work. In the university environment, ideational editing, whether credited or not, should happen every day. It should keep us up at night, and I believe it does. Students should be both daunted and provoked by good ideas from editors. If the problem is distinguishing peer review from line-editing from proofing, then who cares—who would want credit for proofing or line-editing without reference to ideas? We could do away with all the editors in NYC and also fire half of the authors for academic dishonesty, while simultaneously abolishing all peer editing in classes. In my own classes, I’ve often wondered if that wouldn’t be the very best reinforcement of the need for peer editing. If we can’t edit each other’s essays, we oughtn’t be calling it a writing center or a writing class—but instead a brainstorming session.

Regarding: David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” and Joel Haefner’s “Democracy, Pedagogy, and the Personal Essay.”

I like Bartholomae’s idea of involving all composition students in the discourse community. That would contrast neatly with involving all students in the “real world,” which requires a discourse community to function—or perhaps just for progress. DB claims that writing has been billed as a tool to be used by the educated mind instead of a tool for learning. I really like his description of learning to play music through chords and patterns of composition. If I wrote a description like that, it would turn into a term paper.

Haefner’s discussion of the essay as a genre is pretty provocative. Does the progenitor of a genre epitomize it, or does it develop into a better, more complex, evolved form?

Regarding Haefner, I want to ask what portion of knowledge is based on the individual human experience (rather than collective experience.) I would refer this not to the individual knowledge but collective knowledge (cf. Carl Jung).

What genre is not democratic, not open to everyone, or anyone? It is not my experience that the essay is individualistic, democratic, or egalitarian. Yes, it’s a genre like any other, but it’s easier for the writer to access. Haefner makes the case that it’s just easier for the reader to get involved with.

I had to go over this several times:

Jameson: Genre and form function as ideograms encoding versions of ideology.

Adorno, Jameson: the essay juggernaut as the embodiment of mimesis.

Bourgeois capitalism is embodied by the essay genre.

This is a ridiculous case about Montaigne and the essay as an antiquated form that causes the “originary fallacy.” The extant version of the genre doesn’t describe the origin of the genre. Alice Walker and Fredric Jameson were not writing to each other. I do not find that the personal essay is alien to my students. Why must we define what democratic means? I find it fairly clear in this context and other contexts. Personal essays are too interesting, so Haefner banishes them. I’m impressed with the honesty of these essays he offers (and the pieces for this week).

Eve & Lunsford say that the death of the author helps us to create new forms and new concepts for authors, too. Why does it have to be clearly defined in limited roles for the speaker? I don’t like recapitulating the demands of all these advent groups he mentions—new historicists, feminists, you make up one, et al. Wouldn’t most self-respecting advocates of such groups consider this pandering?

Haefner suggests that we present the context of a cultural essay to students through first-person contemporaneous sources. Why don’t we all do that with Montaigne then? (Not to be bitter: I’m sure that would actually make a great (history) course.)

I am edified to note that I already am teaching my students how we situate ourselves in reference to a text rather than teaching the text itself (or rather its sentiments). I wouldn’t be too sorry if I was teaching the essay itself.

A video from start to finish

I had a pretty fine time making my video, “Writing: Out the Window.” This year has brought me the usual privileges of teaching, which is a new game every day, and really every class every day. In the two composition classes I’ve taken this year, I’ve had several new experiences. First, I had never before written a proper weblog. Second, I had never made a PowerPoint presentation (though I have use live document editing with classes for many years, and I had made Harvard Graphics presentations many years ago). Third, I had never summarized a book with a visual presentation. Fourth, this year I created my first visual essay. Thanks to Dr. Adam Banks for these last chances. In our present class, where I learned more about writing a blog for a closed audience, I also had my fifth chance, making my own video, and this one was a broad assignment yet quite topical. We were turned loose on a video creation process, and thanks to Dr. Bill Endres for this chance. I have recorded and edited a great deal of audio—half my life, really—and usually songs, but I had never made and edited a video on my own.

I had good reason to think I would have someone to man the camera for me (woman the camera), but she did not come home in time for the project. The greatest technical challenge was getting the camera to stand up without jiggling and face in my general direction. Wes informed me of the rule of thirds, which I had barely heard before and never understood before. At close quarters, I placed myself in many of the shots by holding the camera with less than half my face visible. Holding the camera steady like a pistol, the shaking was eliminated from at least the focus of my filming. My last video camera weighed about eight pounds, and the one I borrowed from the University of Kentucky’s English department was only a few ounces. I found no occasion to use a tripod, though to my surprise I filmed one shot at ninety degrees to compensate for the wind. I couldn’t find an editor that would rotate the frame, so that shot didn’t make the cut.

My main argument deals with writing spaces, including the one-person audience of oneself, the privacy and time required to write, and the importance of an organic environment for a humane writing process. To come up with a reason for each shot, I thought over a concept I believed related to my main argument. Then I decided what scene would be appropriate for that shot, and I went to that place. The three settings were Lake Cumberland, on the Wayne County side, Lake Reba in Madison County, and my house (woodstove, deck, and driveway). I took about twice as many complete scenes as ended up in the final draft. I made about ninety minutes of video to produce nine minutes of final footage. Most of the shots were between thirty seconds and one minute, though there were exceptions to each extreme.

About half of the footage I omitted was comprised of technology, including recording my computer’s desktop with Camtasia, discussing the devices and software I obtained for free this semester, and integrating that technology into a grading system for my students’ essays. There were two reasons that I cut all those scenes. First, because it seemed I should be talking about my own writing process, not my students’ writing process or the process of grading; second, because it just wasn’t that interesting. It seemed that it would make a good video to circulate for the next few months, but it didn’t have enough theory or sustainability to remain interesting in five years.

The outlining process helped me significantly. I had slated about forty scenes of ten seconds each, which would describe the process by which I taught myself to write songs better and with more streamlined technology. It was to have a sparse soundtrack, including some speech but no narration. Dr. Endres approved of my initial outline but requested more theory in the film. Since my class with Dr. Banks dealt more with aspects of technology, while our present class deal more with the teaching of writing, I decided that conveying theory without dialogue was impracticable with my bare knowledge of film and film composition. Therefore I decided to talk.

While there was no script, I began talking and forming an idea while on camera. Since each shot required several takes, by about the seventh take of each shot the narration became clearer to me. For the next seven or so takes of each shot, I changed the emphasis from one line or one concept to another, moving the camera around to capture the scene I wanted to approximately match the dialogue. Some moments of narration were stilted and stertorous, and a studio would have cut the silences or retaken the scene. By the time I realized this, I had usually left the scene. There was a great deal of running up and down hills, whither and whence on dams, to and fro on concrete pilons. It seemed very important where I started and ended each scene. At Lake Reba, the sun was going down, and I was concerned that it would be either too dark or too much like time lapse photography when I spliced the scenes together. Most importantly, though, my experience with recording audio has obsessed me with one-take scenes. If I messed up a line of dialogue, I ran back to the camera and tried again. If I panned the wrong direction on a vista, I punched out, rewound, and tried again. There are no added transitions between any frames—I thought them all too silly. When editing audio, I have always limited transitions to full stops and occasional fades, except when eliminating noise.

Many takes and scenes went out the window. Camtasia, though it ran slowly on my laptop, made the process fairly easy. After about an hour of acquainting myself with the program, adding to the library, rearranging, shortening, splicing, and cutting scenes became intuitive. I did think a faster system was in order. Had I tried to make a unified soundtrack, the entire process of making the video would have taken over twice as long. Now that I have seen the product several times, I would not add any of my missing footage. I would, however, make several of the cuts differently, cutting pops in sound in the beginning and cutting occasional dead air. As other students have since mentioned in class, the creation and editing process would make an engaging hobby. I believe this was a promising project. I felt empowered early on, and the open assignment and simple camera caused a feeling of natural flow for the whole process. It became a coherent and rewarding process quite quickly.

(Majority) Status for (Minority) Literature

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Friday, November 11, 2011 8:58:33 PM EST

Kennedy, “Re-membering White Privilege” (http://cccc-blog.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html

I think that the reason the Kennedy's discussion of /Forrest Gump/ stalled after twenty or thirty minutes is that the questions weren’t very good. I mean, they weren’t all that deep… it’s been an awfully long time since I saw that movie once, but there is much more there than those questions. I don’t think we can dignify racist and anti-racist considerations in this film. It was better than that. I do think that when discussing rhetoric and memory, though, /Forrest Gump/ is a pretty good choice. It shows the way one fictitious character, in a sort of magical realist style, can intervene in and influence all history for his lifetime. In a similar discussion, I might use Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, which would take less time to read than watching FG.
Now what do we do with a classroom full of students who could watch that film and think it is a documentary? (It’s a stretch, but I’m hoping they meant it was a documentary of the 20th century, pulling together many significant American events with a single fictional protagonist.) I have an equally mortifying statistic I heard this week: Pregnancy rates went down nationally when the computer game Call of Duty 2 was released. Is it really rhetorical memory if people think FG and JFK are documentaries?

Regarding Royster, "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own":
I think African Americans are usually a cultural group rather than an ethnic group. She’s talking about the double-consciousness in Du Bois, and she talks about it in terms of voice. Du Bois’ voice was carefully considered, but he talks more about mode of address and style. She also talks about Langston Hughes. She is interested in his work, “Not just as simple stories to delight and entertain but as vital players in a transformative process.” I personally like Langston Hughes best in a story like “Salvation,” where he writes like Mark Twain. Shall I think of them both as ethnic voices? Royster wants to “Listen and learn to speak without clenching my teeth.” When she writes in a different and less formal tone, her friend tells her that she has never heard her talk like that, ‘like in your real voice.’ It sounds to me like that person who complimented the author was already speaking very carefully about Royster speaking. I do very much like her last rhetorical question, “What would we say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak”? she asks. I would assert that in writing, there is seldom a dialogue. The rule is not “‘you talk, I talk,’” it’s --I, the author, talk.—

I have thought very much in the last few years about non-minorities teaching minority literature. The first trope which bothers me is filing great works full of great words in a minority file. Great literature is great—it’s not merely confessional, it’s not just identity politics. I believe that if the genre we call the “blues novel” was not marginalized as African American literature (or even Kentucky literature, in the case of Gayle Jones) or 20-21st century post-PoMo, it might be taken at face value. Its face value is worth considering. I have always chewed over the situation of a friend of mine here at UK, a dedicated Ph.D. candidate, a white male, who both studies and teaches African American literature every semester. He is most knowledgeable, attentive, and enthusiastic about his work. I can’t help but think he lacks “street cred” when he walks in on the first day—white, male, suburban, and adhering to the words of black consciousness through the eyes of The Man. I can’t forget, though, that he’s not non-black. First he’s a scholar, and second he is a member of the majority. That gives him a certain objectivity on the matter. (Perhaps it would be better if he was a transgender Latino.) As it stands, though, when he walks in to convey his enthusiasm on the first and last days of class, he has a chance to speak as an audience member. He can tell the students that he likes this literature because it’s great, not because it holds some prestige status compared to other works in the minority canon. Maybe it matters that he’s also teaching to a class that’s less than half black. He’s speaking to some of his people about the finest writing from another people. He’s teaching to part of the audience of Hughes and Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, and he’s doing it with a real, arbitrary knowledge that speaks to his identity, not his racial makeup.

Individual Authors with Collaborative Teachers

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, November 2, 2011 7:05:57 PM EDT

Regarding Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford. “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship.” PMLA 116.2 (Mar 2001) 354-369.
and
Bruffee, Kenneth A. “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English 46.7 (Nov 1984) 635-52.


Ede and Lunsford cite Barthes' "The Death of the Author" as a pivotal moment in writing history. I certainly think that we have experienced the rebirth of the author, after Barthes, after postmodernism, and as one of the culminating features of the personal narrative essays, calls to action, and speech format. In visual essays, it’s more difficult to say that the author is alive. Not that one cannot write a personal visual essay, but it generally increases the distance between author/speech and author/text. Ede and Lunsford quote Joseph Harris regarding the professional life for which professors prepare students, noting their roles as “subaltern dissident and intellectual entrepreneur” (356). These joint positions both as subjugated beings and as upwardly mobile academics constitute an ambivalence in writing, and that tension strung out between the two roles keeps writing assignments challenging.

This piece asserts that the institution takes the ideologies of the individual author and the audience for granted, and I would like to know how it does that. It has not been my experience, except where a general lack of time and interest prevents a body of readers, including instructors, from dedicating the necessary time to each student.

We have to socialize the author as producing, according to Ede and Lunsford. I keep hearing people say that people are standing at a crossroads, one where we need to at least re-engineer, and maybe figure out creatively, who we are and what we do. It is the repetition of this assertion that makes it matter, because standing alone it reads as a platitude or a pep talk. What is different today, I wonder, that gives this mantra currency. Why are we at a crossroads, and why do we need to be more creative than pragmatic? Regarding the position of our economy and our national politics, I would like to think that we could be creative and earn a chance to get out of our mess—but is “creative engineering” not at all to blame for the creation of our predicament? As Berlin pointed out in the beginning of the semester, we have based our university system after the German model. The resulting hyper-specification, along with growing college attendance, interferes with the direct interaction of disciplines. Public media has gained a more general appeal, lost some of its flair for propaganda, yet seems less likely than ever to make a difference in public opinion or national action.

According to Bruffee, we assume that thought is somehow a given, but instead language is created by social interaction (639). To write by oneself requires talking to oneself, he says, and talking to oneself requires discussion with others. Bruffee mentions that tutors can be personally disinterested. How can they remain organized, engaged, and collaborative while maintaining not just objectivity but also personal disinterest? If the tutors are to bring culture and sensitivity about culture to their work, how can personal disinterest be a virtue?

In this essay, the idea of “normal discourse” sounds rich and loaded—research in the years since its publication in 1984 have made composition teachers resistant to the form of straight or normal discourse. Our discussion in class over the features of academic writing speaks to this point: academic writing can be normalized, but it is hardly normal. From a social viewpoint, it might not be discourse, either.

Bruffee’s criteria for his own writing address those characteristics, and I want to reproduce them in list form here. These are the standards he says he readers will use as well. He says, “I judge my essay finished when I think it conforms to that set of conventions and values” (643):
What counts as a relevant contribution;
What counts as a question;
What counts as having 1) a good argument for that answer or
2) a good criticism of it.

Bruffee makes some rough (though maybe well-founded) accusations about teachers who lead discussions so actively that the discussions turn quickly back into lectures. I don’t think that the reason I talk too much when teaching is that I’m mistrust collaborative learning (645). My training, all after the year 2000, did not teach a distrust of “collaboration and community activity” (645). I feel I ending up leading the discussion by the nose, rather than leading it gently as a moderator, and when it happens, I worry that I am using that worst of teacher tricks: asking a question so that students can fill the other half of my sentences, rather than their own ideas. I intervene because I’m interested in collaborative learning—and when it doesn’t seem to be working, I try to revise my questions, my answers, and recast others answers. When it doesn’t work, I use all of those revisions to change the format. If the result is just me talking, those intentions are moot.