Date: 2009-11-27 11:13 Subject: Babel Security: Public Location: looking out on the front lawn Music: George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass" Tags: language theory, peter berger, uncertainty, virtue of fuzziness

This is the first (I think) in a series bouncing some thoughts off Peter Berger's new book, In Praise of Doubt—a title that clearly sings my song. One thing Berger has learned over the years is to write relatively plainly (for evidence that this was not always his way, see Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality).

As a point regarding his method, Berger brings up "a problem that’s very familiar to social scientists: Terms become fuzzy if they’re widely used, both in the vernacular and in academic discourse. People can deal with this in one of two ways. Individuals or groups can eschew such terms completely and create their own, new, sharply defined terminology. (Such terminologies are typically barbaric in what they do to ordinary language; worse yet, they make the writings of social scientists incomprehensible to the uninitiated—a kind of secret language.) The other alternative is to accept the terms as commonly used, but to sharpen them in order to better understand the social reality to which they refer. This is the tactic we prefer." (56)

Same here. But Berger has earned his chops; when I move to avoid barbaric academicisms in my writing, I'm less likely to be understood as pushing beyond them, thus more likely to be dismissed as ignorant of them. I'd much rather ask my students to, for example, pay attention to "ways of using language" than to "discourse formations," not least because the former is a little closer to action language than the latter is. Discourse formations sound relatively static, which the language of contemporary cultural studies generally wants to emphasize; the phrase "ways of using language," although it is indeed vague in that it can refer to many more things than "discourse formations" can, rather suggests behavior that can change and be changed.

Fuzziness has virtue beyond the ordinariness Berger wants to preserve. In forcing us to continually specify and refine our meanings, to provide stipulative definitions as we proceed (which, though inconvenient, strikes me as healthy writing exercise for us all), it helps our writing to mirror the process by which we commit our fuzzy thoughts to language in the first place.

Well, there it is--I've said that thought in some sense precedes language. Hang me, I'm a heretic. It's not that I oppose all theory that portrays language as very deeply co-involved in thinking; it's just that my everyday teaching experience shows me that a thought—say in a beginning writer's malformed sentence that shifts, twists, and breaks as it worms its way toward its blessed period—can easily be worded many different ways. I say we should keep our fuzziness in view, not hide it inside the hermetic black boxes of obscure jargon.

Then again, what the hell is "hermetic" but the granddaddy of all such obscurities? Neither Berger nor I wish to pare our vocabularies down to eighth-grade level. We have inherited a particularly rich language, is all—we don't need to augment it with new reifications every time we want to make a fresh point.

Date: 2009-11-24 07:51 Subject: I Hate Grades, part 47 Security: Public Location: breakfast nook Music: XTC, "Jason and the Argonauts"

Okay, don't go looking for 46 prior posts on the topic. I merely mean the title to communicate that this is just a tiny fraction of the ways in which I hate grades.

Now and then, I get a student complaining that our A to F (or to E-for-excellent-try) feels like a throwback to elementary school. I prefer letter grades for their honest vagueness. "A" should mean excellent, but what is 100% of excellent? The hundred-point scale promotes the illusion that some predefined amount of achievement equals perfection. Our assessment scale should be open at the top. But these arguments have little effect on the student feeling dejected because college itself is disappointingly dull and confusing. "Oh crap, I'm back in frackin' Kindergarten with the ABCs again!"

I offer no solution. Grades are evil; end of story.

Date: 2009-11-22 09:31 Subject: Thinking Out Loud Security: Public Location: Next to a loudly ticking clock Music: Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra

My friend Tom often gives me pause to think, and he did it yesterday in a big way when he told me that, rather than teaching how to produce highly polished, research-based writing that takes weeks to complete, he wanted to teach his students to do the best they can in an hour and a half, which is the time they think they've got and, not so coincidentally, the time their future bosses are likely to give them for it.

Epiphany: that's pretty much how I write, too. I have certain writing projects on which I spend, by anybody's standards, too much time; but for the rest, as for example right now, I draft in my imagination, write, then revise lightly or deeply depending on the case at hand, and the process takes [long pause for thought] many minutes, not many hours, and certainly not days.

Enter Dr. Daniel T. Willingham, cognitive psychologist, my current favorite explainer of students' intellectual development (expect more posts concerning him later): the reason I can think out loud on the page with (somewhat, barely) acceptable results, whereas most students cannot, is that I think differently, not that I write differently. Willingham figures this distinction forth as a matter of depth vs. surface.

I've long thought that the common student complaint "I don't like to go indepth" (the degree to which this phrase gets spelled as one word defies statistical understanding!) actually means "college makes my head hurt." The proper response, in my view, runs along the lines of "I know, dear; of course it does, but that's what we do around here, so take two aspirin and analyze some poems in the morning." They think effectively who think structurally, according to Dr. Dan (and yes, I know: perhaps the reason I like him so much is that he confirms my precedent biases). Those who don't think structurally can only write in discontinuous patches of relatively ineffective thinking. This is a developmental issue, to be dealt with as such. The improvement we seek in this area cannot simply be demanded, as if a better-formulated rule would be more easily followed. When we demand more depth and more worthy purpose, we are as clear as can be; we cannot, however, expect to be understood as such by the inexperienced. They'll be looking for a surface feature called "depth" and, finding no such thing, will find us vague.

This situation invites two opposite kinds of response. Inveterate nurturers and weary cynics alike will avoid head-hurting and disappointment by easing off on the demand for well-structured original thinking, while deep-enders like me (and no, this is not a case in which "myself" is standard usage!) don't know exactly what to do besides keeping up the right degree of steady pressure while expecting lots of frustration. It's our karma, not our lesson plans, that causes this frustration. Students must either endure it long enough to reach "aha!" or else not reach it. What we know from careful research is some do and some don't. Some will and some won't.

I've reached the hour and a half mark now. The village fire department is having a pancake breakfast and I must go show my face. Hope this has been as profitable a read for you as it has been a think-session for me.

Date: 2009-11-21 11:17 Subject: Theory Theory Security: Public Location: the pits Music: Elvis Costello, "Beyond Belief"

I wonder whether writing students would benefit from understanding how mixed the messages we send them are. Perhaps this is better swept under the rug, but I'm not so sure. (I'm also not Saussure, but that's another story.)

The handiest terminology for teasing apart the elements in said mixture would be discourse analysis of some sort (and sorts there are, in plenty): I would "simply" posit the existence of institutionally-based discourse formations, i.e. the academic and the bureaucratic, which seem to emanate from the same places but really issue from different constituencies with different motives. Academic discourse proper differs from bureaucratic discourse to the extent that properly academic communicative purposes center on openness, candor, intellectual courage, and the maintenance of scholarly authority, whereas bureaucratic motives are more likely to include safety, comfort, justification, and the rationalization of official decisions. Academics bare their rear ends; bureaucrats cover theirs.

If I have this fairly sorted out, we can expect academic discourse to be much more terse and economical than bureaucratic discourse can be. Academics will detest cliches and euphemisms; bureaucrats will produce them abundantly. Academics will oppose fuzzy, foggy, and inflated language; bureaucrats will raise obfuscation and misdirection to an art form.

I trust it's clear where I stand. But I also believe that the bureaucrats have their compelling reasons, repellent as these may be. At any rate, you can bet that our students are more likely to graduate into bureaucratic discourse communities than academic ones. The main problem, as I see it, is the way both these kinds of language come at our students mixed, so our best teachings are contradicted by "our" (i.e. belonging to the institution at large) own discursive behavior.

Date: 2009-11-15 13:22 Subject: invite Security: Public Location: bucket seat Music: Los Lobos, "One Time, One Night" Tags: teaching writing, virtual environments

If this blog tickles your fancy, please consider joining my playpen social network, The Deep End of the Pool, devoted to discussing the ins and outs of keeping college writing instruction challenging and fruitful across the disciplines. There's a "Rationale" page featuring some of my brief position papers, etc., and I'm setting up a virtual poolside patio using Small Worlds, an easily mastered virtual environment site, for those who might like to chat in avatar form.

Date: 2009-11-14 16:54 Subject: An Unreal Rule Debunked (first in a long-planned, planned-to-be-long series) Security: Public Location: empty nest Music: Los Lobos, "The Valley" Tags: false rules

One of the few rules my students almost unanimously report having been taught is "never begin a sentence with 'and' or 'but.'" Actual writers, on the other hand, seem never to have heard of it. A quick scan of my bookshelf shows at least ten writers starting sentences with ands and buts for each one who avoids doing so. I say the preponderance of evidence pretty well proves that it is American K-12 teachers who foment the false rule and that the only “discursive register” it betokens is “fake formal”—a register we should point out only in order to denounce and warn against it.

Of course, not all academics recognize “fake formal” for what it is, so we do best to generalize upon the actual practice of estimable writers. Here are just a few who routinely begin sentences and paragraphs with and, or, nor, but, so, and in some cases for and yet as coordinating conjunctions: Martin Luther King, Jr., Mike Rose, Cary Nelson, writing textbook authors Stephen Reid and Diana Hacker, Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, eminent linguist and ace clarinet player Ray Jackendoff, philosopher Paul Ricoeur, environmentalist essayist and poet Wendell Berry, philosopher of art Elaine Scarry, Cultural Studies doyen Anthony Easthope, feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan, Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman, William H. Gass in his essays just as much as in his fiction, Walker Percy same as Gass, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, Alasdair MacIntyre, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Gilbert Ryle, Erving Goffman, science philosopher Marjorie Grene, rhetoric doyen W. Ross Winterowd, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Stephen E. Toulmin, John Dewey (possibly not the best exemplar of academic style, I’ll admit), Jane Jacobs, Simone Weil, Baruch Spinoza (in the standard, venerable translation), Friedrich Nietzsche (ditto), and David Hume (as definitive a linguistic tastemaker as the 18th century ever produced).

On the other hand, Louise Rosenblatt assiduously avoids the practice.

So the rule against beginning a sentence on a coordinating conjunction has nothing to do with grammar nor with the prevailing authoritative style; history does not show it to stem from the past, and present-day academic discourse communities do not, in the main, follow it. Until another reasonable explanation can be found, I’ll continue to believe and to teach that the rule was produced by 20th-century schoolmarms (of all genders, of course) for their own nefarious purposes—that is, to present the well-formedness rules of English Grammar as more extensive and consistent than they in fact are. It is an artifact of authoritarian schooling and nothing more.

Microsoft Word’s grammar checker flags it as wrong, by the way, but it explains merely that some people prefer us not to do it.

Date: 2009-11-09 19:59 Subject: Launching sister blog on Ning Security: Public Location: up on the sun Music: Up On the Sun

This is cross-posted on deepend.ning.com:

A recurring preoccupation on this site will be Action Language as a program for reform in first-year composition pedagogy. As a gesture in that direction, I propose ditching the term pedagogy and not replacing it with androgogy nor any other such neologism. Let's more simply, more directly call it what we do: teaching.

I'll begin again, then: in this blog, I plan to harp often and loudly on Action Language, which I hope might help us do our jobs teaching freshman English more effectively.

Then again, teaching invites its own set of objections, not least as voiced by Heidegger--"What teaching calls for is this: to let learn" (What Is Called Thinking I, 1). I intend to meld two approaches that seem to some to oppose one another: an unrelenting focus upon qualities of scholarly rigor and a near-reverential respect for John Dewey's thinking on teaching and learning. The point of connection, as I see it, consists of the concept of pragmatism, both as a tradition in American philosophy and, more broadly and plainly, as the virtue of practicality. Philosophically, pragmatism makes good existentialism's unkept promise to put doing ahead of being.

In composition, we still tend to teach an object-oriented vision of the field: there are several classes of ideal objects, the product of a writing process yet mainly known by their individual names and outward qualities, i.e. essays, reports, and research papers of various kinds. The number of kinds of essays has always, I confess, mystified me. I must have been out with the flu when my teachers explained the precise differences between, say, argumentative and expository essays, not to mention exploratory ones. Remaining ignorant of such crucial data, I have always thought of an essay as a job of writing that might, if and when appropriate, expose, explore, and argue by turns. I'm pretty sure I can find examples of essays so good people would pay to read them, wherein, nonetheless, the writer does all those things at once. But that's because I see the essay as a more a doing than a being. Those who think their job is to police the borders between a dozen supposedly disparate modes of rhetoric are, in this clear view, obscurantists.

I say we ought to posit a purposely vague (that is, capacious, maybe even improvisatory) entity called "the college essay," defined much more by the process of its production than by its outward characteristics (although I will stipulate some formal rules in a moment). An essay is what happens when a writer seriously tackles a topic difficult enough to admit of some disagreement among experts. It begins with a question, a problem, a puzzle, or a surprise, not with a technique such as comparison or process analysis. It participates in an extant scholarly dialogue, and thus should always cite sources. As scholarship, its purpose is to share in purposeful discussion, not merely to show off one's private learning and certainly not to gas off about one's unsupportable views.

In this view, the rhetorical modes take their proper places in the infrastructure of essays one instance at a time, not as straitjacketing exoskeletons. As in the real world of essays people pay to read, college essays would compare when comparison is called for by the topic, so no student would have to fish around for a topic artificially suited to the form of comparison. The essayists whom we respect the most all feel free to compare, illustrate, define, analyze, enumerate, and perform any number of other chess-like moves in their reasoning, in any order their task happens to demand.

Our best students want to make this transition, and the rest will do better because of it. In my years of experience throwing them into the deep end of the pool, stronger swimmers come of it. Of course, some flail and flounder, some panic, some even grasp others and try to pull them down. A few might quietly drown rather than embarrass themselves by calling the lifeguard's attention to their distress. The shallow end of the pool might seem safer, but in fact it is worse for us to perpetuate childlike dependencies than it is for us to precipitate an awareness of real-life exigencies. I take it that, having graduated high school or obtaining a GED, our students already know what they need to know in order to use somebody else's recipe with somebody else's machinery to crank out reliably tasty donuts of many kinds. This is not what they came to college to learn. But we should know this better than they do. When students betray their hidden assumption that college should teach them better recipes and show them the use of fancier machinery but not demand creativity from them, we need to just say no.

That's the pragmatic way of it, and I intend to explore, expose, compare, contrast, illustrate, narrate, define, analyze, and argue elements thereof as long as I'm able.

Date: 2009-11-01 11:16 Subject: Inhibition Security: Public Location: on the ground floor Music: "Got To Get You Into My Life" (Remastered!)

related observations concerning first-year writers: many of my students are frankly amazed that anyone would allow (much less require) them to rewrite an essay for a higher grade, and they are also manifestly laden with false assumptions concerning what not to do—in today's case in point, a student assuming she's not allowed to do any outside research unless specifically instructed to do so.

I can only speculate that such assumptions come based upon prior experience, which leads to further speculation concerning lazy undoubtedly very much overworked K-12 teachers placing "don't make me work any harder" restrictions, which the students then take for our default position. Once more unto the breach, our time as college teachers is soaked up by unteaching received mistakes. I can think of a better solution, but the behavior of K-12 teachers lies outside my sphere of influence. It's time for me to widen that sphere, maybe.

They also, by the way, seem to assume that it's wrong for them to speculate. For all I know, they think it's wrong for me to ever speculate, but I have trouble imagining any way to really think out loud without doing so. So there's yet another way our students inhibit themselves from showing the fullness of their thinking. Reflecting upon this, I always hear an echo of a phrase someone once used against deconstructionism: "icy knowingness." Anyone know the provenance of that? It's lost in the mists of my failing memory, but it designates a worthy enemy for any future pragmatist theory of writing instruction. My students seem to think they're never supposed to get caught in the act of thinking—never supposed to betray uncertainty. They want their papers to be comprised of true statements only, so it's no wonder they treat us to so many clichés and platitudes.

Date: 2009-10-18 14:51 Subject: back in action Security: Public Location: Storefront Office Music: CSNY, "Find the Cost of Freedom"

Today was my last day of Engl 101Sunday Accelerated for the semester.

Allelu!

Something about the @8-week schedule seems intellectually iffy to me in the first place.  The Sunday Accelerated program is a good idea, but writing instruction fits poorly enough into a fifteen-week schedule, much worse one nearly half that.  I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I suspect the typical freshman-writing learning curve features a natural downward slump before it rises, due to the relearning involved.  If there's considerable transition, reorganization, or reorientation between significantly different paradigms, as I believe there almost always is for freshman writers, we can reasonably expect them to write worse for a little while during their shift toward writing better. (Anybody out there know of well-researched data on this?  I vaguely recall something, ten or fifteen mist-filled years ago . . .)  And if the powers that be decide to double-check our competency by means of supposedly objective testing, what happens if the testing occurs during that slump instead of well after it?  How long does it take for our teaching to take effect, typically?  My own learning curve, I submit, took a lot longer than fifteen weeks. 

I'd love to be judged according to the average gpa of my students after their subsequent four years.  If there's really any important difference between composition philosophies and/or teaching styles, it ought to manifest there, once enough students have processed through. 

At any rate, I now know of one textbook not to assign to classes heavily populated by non-trads.  Sadly, it's the book Storefront Community seems to want to adopt as our standard.  Its pedagogical principles are sound enough (except for an overemphasis on essay genres, but in my view that overemphasis is nearly ubiquitous).  The particular trouble with this particular textbook is its poor readability.  For instance, the first mention of rhetoric occurs as an injunction to "put on your rhetorical glasses and think about audience and purpose."  Few of my students would automatically treat the second part of that compound command as an explanation or definition of the first, so they're left with no notion of how to put on rhetorical glasses, nor even what that kind of spectacles might look like.  They're left, in fact, with "oh, crap, it's over my head again!"

I think the root of the problem here is a pretty deep one: I'm going to call it reification.  And I want my readers to imagine, as I yank at this root, a wonderful old Tom Toles editorial cartoon wherein John Q. Public encounters "the flower of drugs" and decides to pull it out by the roots, but soon discovers that the roots include consumerism, individualism, Capitalism . . . so he gives up the attempt.  Why do we concentrate our attention so much more firmly and easily on subjects and objects than on the verbs that link them?  Why are events and processes, once they are named and become objects of our attention, mentioned more often as nouns than as verbs?  Whence comes our propensity to thing-ify—that is re-ify, in the Latin sense of res—ideas?  There are Marxist and post-Marxist ways of understanding this, and perhaps in a further post I'll hold forth on the beauty of the latter, but for now let me just say that there are ways reification suits our ruling ideology, and there are ways it is more simply a handy cognitive shortcut, and these factors conspire to shape our thought in nounish rather than verbish ways. 

Thus, in highly reified views, writing is stuff, and there are supposed to be very many distinct kinds of it.  An essay is a thing, like a dog, not a unique event in language, having been composed by someone, sometime, somehow.  The important feature in the reified view is genre.  But an alternative, less reifying view might discount genre in favor of technique: not a "compare-and-contrast essay," but an essay that compares and (if one must redundantly mention the fact) contrasts, perhaps doing so among several other actions, such as analyzing processes, defining nonce-words, or what-have-you. I submit that the latter—the use of action language—better captures the details not only of process but of product.  "The modes" are reifications. 

Well, this is starting to smack of a paper topic, maybe even a book, so I'll leave it hanging for the nonce.  Comments, warnings, encouragement—all warmly welcome.

Date: 2009-09-23 19:55 Subject: it's that time of the year Security: Public Location: the easy chair Music: Susquehanna String Band, "Johnson Boys ('ll Never Git Married)"

Some serious stress-cracks are appearing in my classroom management scheme.  Today I presented for half an hour on next week's reading assignment instead of today's, for two sections in a row.  A very nice (apparently also very brave) student gently pointed it out to me afterward, which makes me wonder how many of the rest realized at all.  Discussion was pretty good, in fact, so I literally had no clue. 

But after all, who can damp the students' natural enthusiasm when the topic turns to apostrophes?

Date: 2009-09-11 17:38 Subject: Not Dead Yet Security: Public Location: home Music: Bill Frisell, "Have A Little Faith In Me"

I found out by way of Margaret Soltan's blog, among the best college English weblogs I know, that a longtime intellectual hero of mine died a while ago. Richard Poirier was a chief among the shrinking tribe of literary readers who explicitly class themselves as pragmatists--that is, as students and practitioners of the home-grown American philosophy so called by William James and John Dewey.  Like many of his literary pragmatist compeers, Poirier was a scholar of American modernism, which he often presented as emanating from the example and challenge set by Emerson (he could, for example, call Gertrude Stein "that most ingratiating of Emersonians").   But his reading of that material often brings out a surprisingly quietistic message.  He points out Emerson's unwillingness to find his focus in opposition to others, instead grounding his thinking in what might seem a retreat, in discussion with himself.  It can take some pretty close inspection to reveal the way Poirier himself often makes the same sort of move for the same sort of reason, "arguing that Emerson and, to a lesser extent, James [and by extension Poirier] refuse systematically to inveigh against the conceptual terminologies to which they are opposed because they know . . . they would inevitably end up contriving only another terminology, and one no less abstract and potentially just as oppressive" (Poetry & Pragmatism 135).

For Poirier, words are much more than their mere definitions.  They are sounds said, and the ways of saying matter greatly.  This line of thought, willy-nilly, takes up a side in the most acrimonious American poetics debate: the voice of the true American Grain, in this view, is relatively soft-spoken, unassuming, loath to show off merely for show's sake--it is the over-the-backyard-fence voice, with little interest in any sort of "cutting edge."  The most important modernist poets are thus, arguably, those more like Robert Frost than Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot.  But Poirier would not say so in a voice of pushy authority. "Rather," he suggests, tellingly couching his challenge as discussion of another critic's pronouncement, "he offers a large and crucial argument which calls upon you [emphasis mine] to decide just how important a poet Frost can be for you" (Robert Frost 4).  

If we the people really were helpless products of conceptual systems that shape us as we delude ourselves that we "use" them, I don't see why anyone would bother to study the matter any further.  Neither Emerson nor Poirier nor I believe that to be the case, though.  Some decades ago the pragmatist in me watched as I and many of my colleagues, most of my gradschool classmates, fell into a pit of intellectual gnosticism, a dead-end of critical theory that opposed all common understanding, proclaiming itself the heroic opponent of an evil, all-pervading ideological power.  Poirier was often spotted sadly shaking his head at this spectacle as it played itself out, and happily, ever since, one after another of us have been digging ourselves back out of it.  When we critical emigres look around for a better professional identity these days, it  very often presents itself in terms of nature, and in my case even human nature, a concept whose very legitimacy was denied by that hypercritical gnosticism from which I flee ("icy knowingness," someone once called it).  It might put me at a rhetorical disadvantage, but I feel it's useless for me to state my position in opposition to some cultural-studies orthodoxy I'm bound (by the rules of deconstruction!) to misrepresent.  I just want to do something else.  Poirier was among the first I found who could help me in that direction, authorizing my "something else" as a legitimate way of listening to the sounds and the powers of words in our world.  I thank him for his exemplary avoidance of oppositional posturing, and I hope I can carry forth in some small way his spirit of even-voiced reasonableness.

Date: 2009-09-04 20:35 Subject: just a reminder Security: Public Location: the easy chair Music: Rufus with Chaka Khan, "Tell Me Something Good"

“Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.” - Martin Heidegger

Date: 2009-09-04 13:46 Subject: (no subject) Security: Public Location: the alehouse Music: Joni Mitchell, "Help Me"

As I predicted, my pace posting to this blog has slowed noticeably now that the fifteen weeks of Fall 09 are well and truly underway. Who's got the time?

This weekend—the long weekend that's also the semester's first weekend, when planning is ostensibly done and student drafts haven't yet rolled in—affords me some built-in quality think time at a welcome juncture. A fresh look at writing samples confirms, in my admittedly personal view, two ongoing trends. In some ways, incoming students are better prepared than their peers of five and ten years ago. And before you call up the exorcist to cast out whatever demon made me utter such heresy, let me hasten to add that in some other ways, the oft-noted decline of Western Civilization continues as advertised.

There are, in stubborn fact, fewer incomplete sentences, fewer indecipherably misspelled words, fewer commas out of place in the diagnostic writing samples I've collected this semester. Some of the nuts and bolts of writing are in fact getting learned better than they have been for a long while now. On the other, more sinister hand, there is even less adventuresomeness, less variety, less life in the compositions I've been looking through for the past few days. They still, as they have since NCLB, the testing mania, and the coming-of-age of the milk carton kids, reek of the fear of failure.

Could the world really be so mean? I remember one student with unassailable logic explaining that she knew she needed a 4.0 to become a veterinarian, since she knew a person with a 3.9 who hadn't made it into veterinary college. Never mind that there are a hundred other relevant variables; her worst-case scenario had implanted itself as the only realistic-seeming view—unshakeable and truly poisonous. This anecdotal instance is from many years ago, and since then, as far as I can see, the fear has only deepened and spread. How long, I wonder, can this slide toward a culture of unalleviated fear continue before something really fundamental breaks down?

Yeah, yeah, the sun'll come up tomorrow and all that. I know. People have been predicting the decline and fall of whatever civilization since the first weekend after civilization's dawn. I'll get over it. But if I don't feel their pain, I won't be able to help them through it. "Them": the incipient us. When will I be able to think of us as just us?

Date: 2009-08-29 09:27 Subject: What Teachers Make Security: Public Location: out in front of the storm Music: Jimi Hendrix, "Ezy Rider"

Thanks to Ranjit Dighe for this one.

Date: 2009-08-27 17:32 Subject: Oh Goody: More Meetings! Security: Public Location: Media Central Music: The Animals, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

Today we had our kickoff Writing Program meeting at UFKNS, with a few new faces including lots of grad students. The meat of the discussion centered on exactly the right topic: our collective need to help the incoming students move beyond their increasing dependence upon template-bound, fill-in-the-blank essay forms—increasing partly because it's being drummed in by K-12's reigning, NCLB-driven testing mania.
            Don't get me wrong: I'm not interested in placing the blame for my troubles elsewhere. I think it was our late, lamentable Secretary of Defense who said something or other about "teaching the students we've got"—or was that the VP? Fact is, however much our students may shy away from the power and freedom we want to give them, it's our duty to give it to 'em anyway, to the best of our ability. We can gather more evidence, and I think we should, but the evidence is already strong that they don't regard what we offer them as valuable. It's also pretty clear that what we offer them is valuable indeed. It's just hard to see the need for it until that need arises, as it does in most real-life professional work, but hardly ever in media depictions thereof.
            I like to tell my classes the story of my Uncle Don's fiftieth college reunion (can't you see their eyes glazing over already?) where they polled themselves on various topics, the results of two of which Don couldn't wait to tell me (note the length to which some of us will go to avoid ending on a preposition, even though it's not really illegal to do so). First, there was the question concerning their least-favorite required course: no contest, really. Freshman comp will probably win in that category no matter when or where the poll gets taken. There might be new things under the sun, but composition's unpopularity isn't one of them. Interestingly, though, the reuners also asked themselves which required course turned out most useful in the long run, and we won that round too, by a handy margin. Ha, ha, haha, ha.
            So we first-year writing teachers find ourselves in an interesting spot. Bearing unwelcome news ("whaddya MEAN my writings not so good?!"), we struggle to fill a need our students typically don't want to admit they have--may even be absolutely sure they don't have.
            I might have mentioned this ticklish situation before.
            And I might mention it again from time to time, so interesting do I find it. I can remember rationalizing my own disinclination to take composition seriously, back in the Cenozoic Era. Coming of age in the late, also some-wise lamentable sixties, I arrived at Hiphiphurray College perfectly secure in my self-assessed geniushood, and when I was informed by my freshman comp teacher that I was doing it all wrong, I came to the only conclusion that seemed at all reasonable to me—that he and everyone who looked like him must be idiots. I think it took until my long-delayed junior year before I ran into teachers whom I respected enough to believe when they told me my writing seriously needed work. (Thanks again, Jack. You too, Gerd.)
            They got through to me by recognizing, respecting, and responding to the thinking buried in my undisciplined prose. Here comes another semester in which I can try my best to pay it forward.

Date: 2009-08-26 12:20 Subject: best laid plans Security: Public Location: watching it rain Music: Jobim, "Agua de Beber"

I'm doing it again: working up to and beyond the last minute tinkering with syllabi. Both in composition and in literature courses, the goal is to train students in a complex activity: essay-writing or literary interpretation as the case may be, and sometimes both at once. It seems to me that those of us who differ on how best to do this differ in the last analysis on the components that make up that complexity. What are the basics, really?
            It was a mistaken answer to this question that brought us the "new math" in the 1960s. Analyzing the field, mathematicians noted that set theory seemed to be the most basic of mathematical building blocks, so they set about teaching set theory to grade-schoolers, with well-documented chaos and dissatisfaction resulting therefrom. The theorist's idea of "basics" differs greatly from the practitioner's. Similarly, many of us, me included, have been trying to teach effective writing by walking students through a minute analysis of the process by which such writing is most commonly accomplished. But our analysis tends to be theoretical. It too often comes to resemble a running coach lecturing first on proper foot position, then on knee action . . . you get the picture. Not pretty.
            My first move to reunite the sundered pieces of this process is to recur to dramaturgical analysis: Kenneth Burke's pentad of rhetorical foci, act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This does not mean further dissection, but the opposite: I want to make sure each of the working parts of my theory connects functionally with all the others. So I don't want to fall into teaching audience awareness, for example, except in full context: at each writing occasion (act), for that particular kind of writing (scene), I (agent) imaginatively construct an ideal audience of well-informed, well-practiced readers (paragons of agency) interested in deepening their understanding of the topic (purpose). I end up, thus, with a pretty specific and concrete audience by means of this analysis, even though, as Ong puts it, "the writer's audience is always [I would say always partly] a fiction."
            Yes, you are a fiction.
            But I am not a solipsist, so I don't get to characterize you any old way I please. I'm confident that I have you pegged as well-intentioned folks, interested in teaching or learning writing (or, in the most advanced instances, in both). I didn't come to this conclusion by sequentially considering different possible audiences and speculating about their wants and needs! I brought you here by writing about a certain kind of thing a certain kind of way.
            Or, rather, our disciplinary community brought about the connection. My joining this community enables me to do whatever it is I can do by means of this writing--little enough, but hopefully not nothing. Do we teach such joining-up as part of the process? I hold it more important than recursive revision (of which, for better or worse, for timeliness's sake, I am not doing much in this weblog).
            More, as usual, later . . .

Date: 2009-08-25 18:12 Subject: More on the Faculty Forum Security: Public Location: in front of the teevee Music: Bill Frisell, "Strange Meeting"

It was very nice. I got to savor the Gewürztraminer as dessert after a lovely dry Riesling (Dr. Konstantine Frank's winery provided the tasting, possibly in recognition of the fact that Storefront CC's parent campus is developing a viticulture and oenology curriculum). Even before that, I was gratified to learn that Service Learning is being promoted strongly by the administration and that it might be a pretty good grant magnet for us.

          I have been teaching a Service-Learning version of freshman composition for several years now at UFKNS, and I believe strongly that it enhances the course. The idea there is to require students to volunteer 20 hrs. of their time during the semester in approved programs and have them write about it in two different ways: personal reflections on what their service teaches them, and research essays on some of the social problems their service addresses. Savvy compositionists might experience an Aha! moment here: the service itself makes for a personal, caring connection between student and writing topic, all part of my evil plan, bwahahahahahahahahaha. . . .

          I also got to schmooze the IT guy in charge of online teaching. I'd love to hybridize my comp courses: move most of the info-transfer online, out of the classroom, and move more of my face time to one-on-one or small-group coaching. As far as I can tell, the results are in and hybrid wins: more effective pedagogically than either all-online or all-nonline. It would also be a great facility stretcher for space-challenged Storefront if a class could meet once a week for 80 mins instead of two or three times that.

          As for my seeming political dilemma, I think I blogged too soon. My worry was that it would seem arrogant for me to forgo the how-to-teach-composition-better panel. But on further consideration, I no longer think of it as that--it was more like the how-to-make-WAC-more-effective panel. "Write to Learn" is a brand-name grade school language arts program, but "Writing to Learn" is the slogan of a Writing Across the Curriculum initiative. They could have used my poster presentation from three years ago for that.

          So I need to watch myself, knowing that I get overly testy when the full-timers look like they're about to forcibly teach me stuff I already know. In this case, that just wasn't happening. So what're ya crabbin about, Weeks? Life is good!

          And Dr. Frank's prize Riesling is Excellent!

Date: 2009-08-25 10:42 Subject: Breakout Sessions Security: Public Location: on the stage set for Krapp's Last Tape Music: Gillian Welch, "Miner's Refrain"

I'm heading out this afternoon to attend Storefront CC's Second Annual Faculty Forum, and I intend to blog quite frankly about it this evening. Here's the setup: together we get the start-of-year spiel in the auditorium, then there are two brief presentation sessions, then a reception with vino. (Yowzah!) I'd like to attend three of the sessions, but the laws of physics allow me only two. Two are in areas I'd like to break into at Storefront: service learning (which I already do at The University Formerly Known as Normal School)and hybrid course design (for which I am working up a proposal at said University). The third is more specific to my field: "Writing To Learn." I'm curious whether that has anything to offer me, but I will baldly admit that I doubt it, since it sounds just like what I've been doing in my classroom for decades. My problem with this decision is thus partly political, the more so since I hope some of the people directly involved are reading me.

        Sadly, I can't stay for the whole hooley, as I need to get the car home to the wife by four, so I might only be able to slurp down one quick Gewürtztraminer. Them's the breaks.

        More later.

Date: 2009-08-22 12:05 Subject: Sunday Accellerated Starts Tomorrow Security: Public Location: in the cockpit Mood: chipper Music: Sousa, "The Washington Post"

One of my special adventures this semester is using a new textbook, which my department at Storefront is considering adopting for the whole writing program. I'm used to my own discretion in that area, and as soon as I heard that such a move was under consideration, I reacted for me predictably: Oh No, Not THAT Crap Again! And asking around among the redoubtable veteran profs at U.F.K.N. (The University Formerly Known as Normal School), I reassured myself that my judgment on the matter was not at all unreasonable. All agree with me that the cure for whatever ailment this department thinks it has is not more surveillance and control, but rather more collegial trust and respect. They have hired capable professionals, but they seem loath to treat some of us as such.

      But on reconsideration, I have decided to give their chosen textbook a tryout anyway. (Note how this writer, a credentialed master—nay, Doctor—of academic discourse, routinely begins his sentences and even paragraphs with "and" or "but" anywhere it makes transitional sense to do so--what a scandal!) First of all, I do agree with its pedagogy (need a better term for that, especially at non-trad-rich Storefront CC) (need a better term for non-trad too, btw), emphasizing academic community and the proper handling of the texts of others without dwelling on plagiarism restrictions: a positive approach, refreshingly. Secondly, who the heck do I think I am, anyway? In fact, I am as well or better qualified to make such decisions than any and all of those presently threatening to do it, both in academic accomplishment and in length and breadth of experience, but this is no good reason to act superior toward them.

     So why, one might ask, am I blogging about it instead of feverishly preparing? Feverishness has never done me a bit of good, and all prep and no play makes Jack's course dull indeed. This is happening. I just hope I can do it mindfully, transparently, and consciously enough to persuade the deciders that my position is well earned when I tell them that a little anarchy is pretty much always preferable to authoritarianism.

     . . . upon which, more later.

Date: 2009-08-19 12:30 Subject: Gearing Up Security: Public Location: in the high tower Music: Loudon Wainright III, "Motel"

It has been unusually hard this pre-semester for me to clear my head, get everything organized and ready for crunch-time. Too many side projects, for one thing: I'm trying to design an online writing center for the Second Life virtual world, as well as polishing up various other aspects of my web presence (upon which more later), plus I'm auditioning a different textbook in my Storefront CC first-year comp course and teaching Creative Writing for the first time ever. Toss in two lit courses (World I and Children's) and that's a 24-credit-hour plateful. Just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap.

I plan to blog much more regularly this year, so, all you loyal followers, be ready. Talk to me! Contribute! Stir up trouble! Let's pitch a Wang Dang Doodle all semester long! All year long!