CCE

The Rhetoric of the "Dear Student" Letter

In academic circles there is the kind of letting-off steam essay that some write, or think about writing, that is framed as a letter to a semi-hypothetical student, but which affords the writer a place to get something off of his or her chest.  Said semi-hypothetical student is anonymous and in truth, is a concatenation of all of the other students who have struck the very same nerve in the writer. 

Sometimes the tone of the letter is one long fling of anger about something--late papers, cell phones in class for example; other times the tone can be sarcastic or  instructive (especially when the writer chooses to explain why the dear student's act was wrong on so many levels).  Occasionally, these letters can take on the tone of the lofty, condescending professor of old, talking down to a population that may or may not be paying attention anyhow.

Actually,  the real audience of these letters, all of them, doesn't seem to be written to the "dear student," but to the dear colleagues, who can respond with pity, sympathy or disagreement. When the writer moves to get away from the sarcasm and into an explanation of why an individual behavior or institutional practice is unproductive, counterproductive  just plain wrong, then there's room for this reader to sit down and chew on the topic.  Otherwise, I click away from the article and read something else. 

The above is the long way into talking about the "Dear Plagiarist" article that ran a few days ago in the IHE.  When I saw the title, "Dear Plagiarist," my first reaction was that the reader was going to be in for one of those bile-soaked outbursts in  which not much is accomplished except the venting of an understandably frustrated college professor.  Yes, the title caught my attention, but until Nels tweeted that the essay was worth reading, I was put off enough by the "j'acuse" title to skip it altogether.  The very title suggests that the student has transgressed beyond redemption, though oddly, to put that label on the student also suggests that both student and act have considerable power, which several commentors show can be the case.

Couser's "dear student" is someone who seemed to avoid reading the assignment instructions or paying attention in class, and who flunked the paper by using Spark Notes to think for her--though she did paraphrase the work.  Based on his refutations, it doesn't sound like he had simply given a terse assignment and expected the students to forage for themselves in the great forest of the humanities.  Instead, it sounds like he gave assignments and readings that would have lead anyone paying attention to be able to at least try writing a response. 

The truth is, we don't know what lead to the student's behavior, and the overall tone seems to be one of exasperation with her.  I've been there, and I'll bet you have, too.  And I'm sure I'm not the only professor to have been impressed with the energy, intelligence and creativity some students put into pleading their cases, from our offices all the up the chain.  But the questions remain--why didn't the student just write the paper?  And why was it easier not to?  And are we surprised that TurnitIn didn't catch it? And why did the student bother to paraphrase?  And what goes on institutionally that allows students to cheat on papers and get by with it because their untenured or parttime instructors rightfully fear that the poor grade will make said instructors look bad? 

Raising these questions, listening to the conversations that bring in answers from all kinds of perspectives and  readings (like Pluralizing Plagiarism,for example)seem to be the most useful response we can enact when reading any essay/letter of this genre, which seems,on the surface to be an individual cry for help, but which carries undercurrents of an ongoing professional need to critique a situation that occurs time and again.

For the adjuncts in the crowd...

...don't miss Deb Olin Unferth's short story "Wait Till You See Me Dance" in the July Harper's.

Writing for publication

Just noticed that the NYTimes has an essay contest running: How Has College Changed You? I haven't before had students submit writing for "real-world" publication (not counting blogs), but I'm thinking I might try it. What other options for possible publication have you suggested to or required of yr students?

NCTE Report "Writing in the 21st Century"

Have you read the new NCTE Report entitled Writing in the 21st Century? Here's a chunk from the intro.

"Today, in the 21st century, people write as never before—in print and online. We thus face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing a new curriculum supporting those models; and creating models for teaching that curriculum. Historically, we humans have experienced an impulse to write; we have found the materials to write; we have endured the labor of composition; we have understood that writing offers new possibility and a unique agency. Historically, we composers pursued this impulse to write in spite of—in spite of cultures that devalued writing; in spite of prohibitions against it when we were female or a person of color; in spite of the fact that we—if we were 6 or 7 or 8 or even 9—were told we should read but that we weren’t ready to compose. In spite of."

Here's Mark Baurlein's response to the report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"What to say about this odd opening? The first sentence is a notch above the freshman’s opening “Since the beginning of time . . .” The next sentences cast writing in heated terms of struggle and liberation (“impulse,” “labor,” “possibility,” “unique agenda”). And then we have anti-writing cultures, racist and sexist prohibitions, and age tyranny. Cap it off with that inane melodramatic phrase “In spite of” (italicized in the original).

Keep in mind that this report proposes a recommendation that teachers bring 21st-century writing habits (texting etc.) into the classroom. That is a complex and far-reaching revision, and it merits a steady and scientific approach to, among other things, social and technological trends, the relation of classrooms to society, and the intellectual value of those new literacy habits.

But when a report starts out by overloading the central concept with political overtones and identitarian dramaturgy, one wonders about the agenda. Why has NCTE come down so strongly and so enthusiastically on the side of 21st-century literacies?"

I find Baurlein's response a little mean-spirited, but I agree with his point that we need to seriously consider "the intellectual value of those new literacy habits" before endorsing them whole-hog. I've done as much as anyone in my own department to introduce blogging, wikis, and the idea of digital literacy into the writing classroom, but I'm not persuaded, for example, that texting is a valuable literacy practice.

As always, I'm in the middle. I'm not persuaded by the techno-dystopians that new writing practices like texting contribute to an overall decline in literacy. Neither am I persuaded by a techno-utopian like Yancey that they are somehow magically liberatory or that they automatically entail valuable forms of participation.

I would add, finally, that I don't think NCTE fully appreciates how many students who go to college (especially first generation students like myself) yearn for elevated forms of literacy (rhetorical or poetic). I would have felt pandered to by a course that told me texting (if texting existed when I was a wee lad) was a college-level literacy. How to acknowledge and incorporate some of these new literacies in ways that are valuable?

cross-posted to Middlebrow

Cell Phones In The Classroom: There's a Place For Them

On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed.  Not a text, not a tune, nothing.

On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county's disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up for with their cell phones.

On Friday, we were using Re:Writing Plus! and logged in for the first time.  Except that not everyone was successful.  As I walked around helping out the students, one of my students pulled out his cell phone and dialed the 1-800 number for help.  At first I was amazed, but then I shrugged and thought that it was an efficient way to deal with the problem.

Today, two of my deaf students were arranging to have other students take notes for them.  Instead of relying on the interpreter, they (deaf and hearing) decided to text each other later.  During class, one of the students texts the person sitting next to him if he needs something.

I don't have any profound theory or pedagogical move to embed these situations in, except to say that the cell is becoming more and more a part of us that it seems like second nature.  And sure, there are students who would text their significant others during class if I let them.

Personal plans

I'm always on the look-out for different ways to approach the personal essay assignment (which, I agree with Mike Arnzen, is important in the FYC curriculum, but nevertheless often seems problematic). One variation I've used is the tool essay, inspired by Scott Russell Sanders' often-anthologized "The Inheritance of Tools," asking students to use as the kernel of their essay some useful object in their lives (I want to avoid the embroidered-pillow-from-Aunt-Emmie-which isn't-really-all-that-interesting-but-it's-all-I-can-think-of sort of essay).

A couple other possibilities have presented themselves:

• I ran across an article about book-collections (of course, I can't find it now in my bookmarks, but will try to add later) and how the author supposed that her character was revealed by the contents of her bookshelves. I thought I might ask students to write about one thing that they collect (some class of things of which they possess multiple "samples"--CDs, friends, photographs): how did you start yr collection? how do you select and rate its elements? how do you store or organize or use yr collection? what does yr collection reveal about you?
• Collections of personal essays also seem useful as writing-triggers. A few semesters ago I used Judith Kitchen's Short Takes (note Amazon's price of $10.85!!). In a between-semesters orgy of bookstore-browsing, I ran into another anthology that looks wonderful for this purpose: the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's 3 Minutes or Less. It's organized into thematic chapters (Beginnings, First Love, Illusions, Heroes, Journeys, A Lesson, and so forth) and includes works by very well-known writers (William Kennedy, Jane Smiley, William Styron, Russell Banks, Gail Godwin, Annie Dillard--too many others to list). I'm not using this as a text this semester, but may consider it for the future. (I thought I might read a few essays out loud as prelude to some in-class journalling.)

Any other suggestions for approaches to the personal essay beyond the "significant event" narrative? (Or ways to elicit personal essays on topics other than car accidents and dead grandparents?)

Teaching Resolutions

Does anyone have teaching-related resolutions for the new year? I think I have two.

1. Make my students talk more.
2. Try to remember what it was like to be student.

I'm well on my way to fulfilling the second resolution since I began classical guitar lessons last month. Learning new things later in life is difficult enough. I've always thought I've had decent manual dexterity. But playing guitar makes me feel like I have the fine motor skills of the 1931James Whale Frankenstein. There's nothing like a grown man clumsily fingering his way through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to bring a little humility.

Length, depth, breadth: the virtues of book-length texts

On his eponymous blog Bill Degenero describes the advantages of using whole texts rather than readers in FYC (and other undergraduate) classes, seeing a deeper level of engagement in his students that results in/is the product of fruitful discussion and more thoughtful writing (but don't trust my summary--read his post for yourself!). Book orders are due soon at my CC, so it's a timely post that raises some important questions.

For a variety of reasons (economic as well as pedagogic) I've pretty much thrown away the idea of using FYC readers. I'm drawn to the idea of giving my students a deeper exposure to subjects than they get from the sources they typically find for "research assignments" (whatever form they take).  I've tried to do this with theme-based classes, using both related readings and, usually, a book-length text as well, but student reaction was ambivalent, mostly due to boredom/exhaustion with the theme I selected (I've tried food, technology, and education). Bill's post makes me wonder about the possibility of using, rather than one theme, several book-length texts to give some variety of subject matter, which was, if I remember correctly, John Lovas's approach. (Of course, the issue arises of how much to expect freshman students to read...)

Possible nonfiction texts. Bill's students have been reading Paul Loeb's book The Soul of a Citizen. I've used John McPhee's Oranges, Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Steven Johnson's Ghost Map. Other possibilities I've considered: Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, though these may be too long. Any other suggestions, or suggestions for selection criteria??

The nonargumentative research paper

After six years of struggling with the research paper requirement for Comp 1 (conventional topics, paragraphs patchworked to incoherence), I'm trying a new approach, inspired by the format of Harper's Annotation section. (Here's an example that's freely available--there are many with more accessible subject matter, but you can see the basic layout: an image or visual artifact of some sort surrounded by discrete text boxes, aka paragraphs, filled with researched info.)

The traditional argumentative research paper (esp. as a first research assignment), I'm hypothesizing, is much too complex, so I'm separating out argument from research in a developmental sequence that goes something like this (a work in progress this semester still):

• I had students first write a personal essay (btw, if you haven't seen it already, check out Clancy's list of reasons for giving for such an assignment) and then an ethnography.
• Essay 3 is an argument based on personal experience and observation (arguing against the conventional view of an object, activity, abstraction), focusing on clear statement of thesis and cookie-cutterish development pattern of series of reasons each developed into paragraph.
• The Annotation assignment (I encouraged students to select images that tied to their personal interests) will focus on formulating research questions, finding sources, and integrating info into coherent paragraphs (without having to sustain at the same time the thread of an argument). Paragraph coherence seems to vanish with the argumentative research paper, so I'm hoping the emphasis on paragraphing with these discrete sub-topics will help.
• For the last essay I plan to give pairs of articles that present opposing views (so that I have control of topics, to avoid the too-familiar) and ask students to do a text-wrestling synthesis, with a somewhat scaled down amt. of research to try to reconcile contradictions of fact.

Question(s): What nonargumentative research projects have you used, and how do you think they support students' cognitive development?

Viral Bob and The Lizards of Satan

The election season is always a terrific time to teach rhetoric.  We know this, right?  And this season has been a harvest of topics to choose from, whether it be speechwriting, racism, sexism, and so on.
In my freshman comp class, in preparation for the students' first essay, we've spent the week reading and analyzing op-ed columns about Sarah Palin, examining the focus, the arguments, and the references writers from different political persuasions and parts of the globe use to discuss the Alaska governor's candidacy.

As we've cyberwalked through the minefields and forests of political-speak this week, we've been able to watch, nearly daily, how a writer's work can be misinterpreted even while it has been argued, used as a "true fact," and even laughed at.  This serendipitous experience wasn't planned, and perhaps that's part of what is making it so successful--instead of tracing backwards and forwards in time, our reference is the immediate past, and concerns our class and our country.  This past week,  we've come to class to check out who has referred (directly or indirectly) to "Fake Governor Sarah Palin Quotes," written by Washington (state) blogger, Bob Salsbury, whose post of August 30 is reproduced below, for your reading pleasure:

Fake Governor Sarah Palin Quotes

Gov. Palin and her Eskimo husband enjoying some lean and healthy moose bacon.

How in the hell did Sarah Palin ever pass the vetting by McCain's people? This is unreal. Below are some fake quotes of Governor Palin I made up just for fun:

On Creationism:

The simple yet elegantly awkward moose proves God's creation and not evolution is the source of all life. How could something as oddly shaped and silly looking as a moose evolve through so-called "natural selection?" Is evolution a committee? There is nothing natural about a dorky moose! Only God could have made a moose and given it huge antlers to fight off his predatory enemies. God has a well known sense of humor, I mean He made the platypus too.

On oil exploration and drilling in the ANWR:

God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan really, so when they died and became petroleum products we, made in his perfect image, could use them in our pickup trucks, snow machines and fishing boats. Now, as to the ANWR, Todd and I often enjoying caribou hunting and one year we shot up a herd big time, I mean I personally slaughtered around 40 of them with my new, at the time, custom Austrian hunting rifle. And guess what? That caribou herd is still around and even bigger than ever. Caribou herds actually need culling, be it by rifles or wolves, or Exxon-Mobil oil rigs, they do just great!

On Alaskans serving overseas in Iraq:

Well, God bless them, and I mean God and Jesus because without Jesus we'd be Muslims too or Jewish, which would be a little better because of the superior Israeli Air Force. 

Disclaimer: She didn't actually say these things - I made them up. But thanks for all the visits.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Okay. Here's what you have to know about Bob:  his writing  is wild, funny, satirical, clever, and did I mention--satirical?  So when you read that Governor Palin thinks:

God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan really, so when they died and became petroleum products we, made in his perfect image, could use them in our pickup trucks, snow machines and fishing boats,

You have to understand that Bob, not the Governor, wrote it (as many of my astute students have pointed out, the post is titled "Fake Governor Sarah Palin Quotes."). 

Of course, you don't have to understand anything, and therein lies the fun.  Bob's original post was on August 30, and by the next day, he wrote that discussion boards at MSNBC and Yahoo had picked up on it. 

And then, by September fifth, there was a domain created with the moniker "Lizards of Satan," and mention of the dinosaurs on a comicforum.  The next day brought links from Hullabaloo and Rapture Ready. Fortunately, Snopes swooped in to affirm that the post was a JOKE.

It was at this point that I began showing the blog to my class.  I thought it would be an interesting tidbit on watching how language can miscommunicate when misread--no matter how hard the writer may strive not to be misunderstood.  And that would be that.

But,no. The next day Anderson Cooper and CNN intervened, interviewing Bob and showing screenshots of his blog. However modest the real Bob is in person, he bravely posted a clip of his interview--which I shared with my students. A bonus was watching another clip of Matt Damon referencing the idea that S.P. believed that dinosaurs existed 4,000 years ago.  "He went to Harvard," I pointed out to my students.

On Friday we read Bob's  post about the article by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times as well as the clip of the Breitbart TV piece on "A Blogger Named Bob." Much of the Breitbart piece was a summary of what had already happened, which provided my students the opportunity to watch the trail that the rumor had taken throughout the week, and to see how each day, different media, different writers, in oh-so-many contexts were using the information. 

Although the school week was over, the rumor's shelf life wasn't, and on the opening sequence of Saturday Night Live, a program that doesn't shy away from satire, actresses Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did an opening bit on Governer Palin and Senator Clinton sharing a podium.  "Please, ask this one about dinosaurs," Poehler-as-Clinton smirks towards the end.

So we'll be watching and problematizing the references to Bob's post for as long as the semester lasts, I suppose.  I'd like for us return to the rumor train at the end of the semester and really critique, via writing and research, all of the places that this rumor has gone, all of the places it hasn't as well as reasons why this is so--what does it suggest about the transmission of ideas/rumors and about reading and reacting and so on and how does this fit into our larger purpose as writers in terms of using other writers' words responsibly? 

We just might ask Bob.

Gov. Palin and her Eskimo husband enjoying some lean and healthy moose bacon.

How in the hell did Sarah Palin ever pass the vetting by McCain's people? This is unreal. Below are some fake quotes of Governor Palin I made up just for fun:

On Creationism:

The simple yet elegantly awkward moose proves God's creation and not evolution is the source of all life. How could something as oddly shaped and silly looking as a moose evolve through so-called "natural selection?" Is evolution a committee? There is nothing natural about a dorky moose! Only God could have made a moose and given it huge antlers to fight off his predatory enemies. God has a well known sense of humor, I mean He made the platypus too.

On oil exploration and drilling in the ANWR:

God made dinosaurs 4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan really, so when they died and became petroleum products we, made in his perfect image, could use them in our pickup trucks, snow machines and fishing boats. Now, as to the ANWR, Todd and I often enjoying caribou hunting and one year we shot up a herd big time, I mean I personally slaughtered around 40 of them with my new, at the time, custom Austrian hunting rifle. And guess what? That caribou herd is still around and even bigger than ever. Caribou herds actually need culling, be it by rifles or wolves, or Exxon-Mobil oil rigs, they do just great!

On Alaskans serving overseas in Iraq:

Well, God bless them, and I mean God and Jesus because without Jesus we'd be Muslims too or Jewish, which would be a little better because of the superior Israeli Air Force. 

Disclaimer: She didn't actually say these things - I made them up. But thanks for all the visits.