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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?)
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.
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'sHot, Flat, and Crowded, though these may be too long. Any other suggestions, or suggestions for selection criteria??
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'slist 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?
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?
Picking up from Jason's recent wiki post, I meant to offer a few particulars about how and why I've been using wikis in comp class. The ideas of social construction and knowledge-building by consensus that stem from how wikipedia functions need not apply to the wiki as used in the classroom. (I'll offer that as hypothesis, anyway.) The analogy I'd suggest is the electronic bulletin board.
I first used wikis a couple semesters ago as the space for research groups (four or five students per group) to collect up entries for an annotated bib assignment. Students selected first and second choices from a list we'd brainstormed together; I made assignments, trying to even out numbers and skill levels in each group. Students then had to decide how to divide up the workload of locating both Internet and database articles, providing a very brief (couple sentence) summary, and evaluating with specific evidence of amount of usable material, authority and objectivity of author (the usual criteria I write on the board sixteen times a semester). Using the wiki allowed students to post hyperlinks to articles, so that others in the group could check out summary and evaluation. I posted comments and questions on esp. strong or weak entries (using some distinctive color--I had asked students as well to type their name in a unique color so that they, and I, could tell who had written what). Of course, I could have done a similar thing in google docs, but the public nature of the wiki allowed students to look as well at the work of other groups, and a later writing assignment allowed students to draw sources from either their own research wiki or another group's.
A second way I've used the wikis just this semester involves my standard beginning-of-the-semester assignment the classmate snapshot. (Briefly, students interview each other in order to write a sharply detailed--in theory--paragraph that provides a snapshot of their subject's life.) In the past, using course management software, I have asked students to post these on the discussion board provided, but the wiki is a much cleaner interface, with snapshots all appearing on the same page (none of that cumbersome clicking in and out of posts). And because I'm using course blogs, it was an easy matter give students hyperlinks to the wikis I had set up (one for each of my classes).
In short, I've been using wikis not for their wikipedia-like possibilities for collaborative work (several students producing one joint project, like many sculptors moving over a large piece of sculpture), but rather for their convenience (in terms of being able to hyperlink), their simplicity of navigation, and their public nature (for helping to build community).
Your question(s), then: With what types of assignments have you used wikis? Why wikis, rather than some other format? If you haven't used wikis, why not?
How about Lewis Lapham's new mag, Lapham's Quarterly? (The Summer 2008 issue is titled Book of Nature; earlier issues center on war and money.)
Here's a description of the project:
LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY sets the story of the past in the frame of the present. Four times a year the editors seize upon the most urgent question then current in the headlines - foreign war, financial panic, separation of church and state - and find answers to that question from authors whose writings have passed the test of time. The method assumes that profound observations of the human character and predicament don't become obsolete. An issue addressed to the glory of military empire might open with the writings of Homer, proceed to contributions from Thucydides, Tacitus, and Marie de Medici, move forward in time to passages from the works of Dante and Shakespeare, come nearer to the present with the notations of Twain and Freud and Virginia Woolf, eventually arrive at the table talk of Adolf Hitler and the faith-based initiatives of President George W. Bush.
Abridged rather than paraphrased, none of the texts in Lapham's Quarterly will run to a length longer than five or seven pages, some of them (a love lyric, the recipe for Queen Mab pudding, a cure for the Bubonic Plague) to no more than five or seven paragraphs; literary narrative and philosophical commentary as well as letters, diaries, speeches, maps, charts, landscape painting, photographs, bills of lading, writs of execution.
Many of the readings may be a bit ambitious, but there's quite a selection to choose from (of good FYC-length) and very attractively produced (I'm a sucker for nice paper).
Another option, for the same price, is Harper's anthology The Sixties.
I'm going to be doing a brief presentation on wikis to fellow instructors. I thought I might use this clip from Colbert for the satirical portion of the presentation.
In one morning of grading, at the end of this spring semester, I found four instances of plagiarism in my students' essays. My emotional responses were tangled: anger and disappointment, queasiness at the impending confrontations, sadness at what I imagined to be (in several cases at least) my students' desperation, the secret thrill (almost) of having my hunches justified, and the sense of guilt that I had not done more to prevent it in the first place. It was the guilt that set me to thinking and looking for resources.
This site from Central Queensland University (apparently no longer maintained but with lots of refs through 2006) offers many resources and links; a page from Michigan State's Faculty Development site also gives many links.
The wholesale copy-and-paste sort of plagiarism can occur, of course, with almost any writing assignment. (Doug Johnson offers some valuable general tips on "Plagiarism-Proofing Assignments," applicable in a wide variety of courses and grade levels.) But the two FYC assignments I'm concerned with here are the traditional research paper and the writing-about-literature essay (which is where "my" plagiarism cases occurred this semester).
Research paper case.
One general anti-plagiarism strategy involves restriction either of subject or of sources to be used (perhaps providing one or two sources students must use, to be supplemented by their own research). I have tried restricting subjects, though more to avoid cliched topics than plagiarism, as well as having students self-select into groups based on topics the class brainstormed (followed by collaborative source-gathering). This past semester I was a little more restrictive, asking students to argue the desirability (or not) of urbanization, with info drawn from two out of three sources I provided plus additional, fairly minimal research of their own. The main tension here involves the notion that students need to find topics for themselves, that personal investment is necessary for effective writing. (I remain ambivalent about this issue.)
The other main approach, in terms of assignment design at least, involves process. Nick Carbone gives here a compelling argument for the use of research portfolios (on grounds beyond just plagiarism-reduction), as well as an interesting comparisonof plagiarism-detection options.
Unintentional plagiarism is always an issue here, to be combated with lots of discussion and practice of paraphrasing and summarizing. Learning how to take notes is vital, what Bruce Ballenger calls "writing in the middle" in his Curious Reader/Writer/Researcher books; for a more theoretical, though still very readable, discussion, I'd recommend his Beyond Note Cards.
Writing about literature in FYC. (I had not thought as much about plagiarism in this course because I expected students to respond directly to the literature read, without use of secondary sources; I need to think more carefully about how to harness students' natural curiosity to see what others have written about a work that students might not feel that they understand--more explicit discussion about the constructive aspect of reading, the notion that different people might read the same text differently??)
To start with selection of readings, plagiarism-reduction is one reason I prefer non-canonical (non-sparknoted) choices. (The idealistically titled site Exampleessay.com offers 30 essays on the Updike's ubiquitous "A & P"; there are hundreds of other Updike short stories one might choose.)
One possible strategy: assignments that ask students to relate several readings (either through comparison/contrast or tracing out some theme or literary device, for example). Thematic readers facilitate these sorts of assignments; this semester I used The Seven Deadly Sins Sampler, to fairly positive student reviews, and Jeffrey Eugenides' anthology My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead seems like another good option.
In terms of process, I've started experimenting with including electronic annotations as part of students' poetry projects, inspired by Kathleen Blake Yancey, whose Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice is on my reading list for summer.
Exercises. IHE had an interesting article recently on plagiarism ("Winning Hearts and Minds in War on Plagiarism"), which included discussion of an assignment that asked students to plagiarize on purpose; Mike Edwards of vitia describes a similar assignment here.
The exercises I'm most interested in constructing, though, are very short ones, giving students a short source or two plus an index card to write on, asking them to compose just a few sentences or a paragraph that uses info from the source(s). Lots of these! (In my marathon classes this summer--three hours and forty-five minutes, maybe we should do at least one per class.)
Any other suggestions??
The psychological approach. Finally, I need to think more/read more about how to counteract those student feelings of desperation that can lead to plagiarism: being more explicit about teaching time management skills, setting and enforcing deadlines in a way that helps teach those skills, getting more frequent feedback on student progress through minute-papers or brief conferences, establishing individual relationships and a comfortable atmosphere where students can admit to feeling overwhelmed before panic sets in.
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