Blog Response #10: Of Students and Authors and What the Heck Do I Assign?

I really appreciate what the author is trying to say. In a way, I agree completely. Recently—I’ve discussed this with a few people—I have been trying to get my students to see their education as empowering. I want them to take control of their educations, to see themselves as agents unto themselves, not just to be acted upon. I want them to use their education here not to merely float on by and get a degree (although, if the statistics hold true, most of the “floaters” probably won’t get a degree). I want them to, in the language of the article, become authors, those people who are active.

Of course, this is harder than it sounds. I have great sympathy for students who, having spent most of their formative years in classes—junior high classes, high school classes, etc.—that simply tell them the “correct” thing to do (rather than teaching them how to think), now struggle to think for themselves. They are so concerned with what’s correct that they don’t stop to think about what’s right, if that makes any sense at all. I know that, in high school, our teachers just wanted us to take the proper steps to get into good colleges so that we could make lots of money. It got really old.

And, for me, I know that my life got much better once I became an author, once I started determining—for myself—what was best, what constructs applied to me. That’s what I want my students to do.

However, the author brings up an excellent point:

Paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same “hypocrisy or despair” as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them. As Bartholomae has argued in his long debate with Elbow, expressivism (which Bartholomae describes as “part of a much larger project to preserve and reproduce the figure of the author as an independent, selfcreative, self-expressive subjectivity” [“Writing” 651) is wrong both because it is inaccurate and because it makes students “suckers and […] powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power and authority as they are present in language and culture” (“Reply” 128-29). When students ultimately come to recognize the degree to which they have thus been made “blind,” they may well rage not at “tradition, power, and authority” as present in culture but at the teachers who have failed to equip them to confront those forces. The problem of the “process” or expressivist pedagogies thus lies in their denial of the material, social, and historical operating not only within and outside the classroom, but also, and more significantly, within as well as outside student consciousness. (10)

I also understand this argument—boy, do I ever. Even though many of my teachers were trying to get me to the “correct” thing (to keep my vocabulary choices rolling), there were some who tried to broaden my horizons with very, very, very creative assignments—assignments, I felt, that had no bearing on the so-called real world. Indeed, these assignments were often introduced as “the kind of thing that universities love,” and so I persevered.

However, after reaching—and graduating from—a university, upon reaching the real world, guess what? Those assignments hadn’t done squat for me. (I remember one assignment in high school where, after reading a novel, we had to draw a giant head on a large piece of butcher paper and then draw pictures inside the head to represent what was going on in the protagonist’s mind throughout the novel. One group didn’t draw anything—they were being lazy, really—but they got credit, because—even though the teacher kinda saw through it—it looked like they were being creative. Now, tell me where in the real world that would happen. “Uh, sir, I didn’t design the logo for the client because the best, uh, logo is, uh, no logo.” No, it wouldn’t happen.) Thus, I can imagine my students raging, just like I raged, if their assignments aren’t in some way relevant.

How do we walk this thin line? I don’t know. I confess that I’ve seen many students in the Writing Center with the “discuss how you acquired literacy” assignment that’s popular in Eng 099—which, incidentally, is also mentioned in the article—and, while I applaud what that assignment is trying to do, I don’t know if it’s really doing anything for the students. By and large, I think they see it as just another busy-work assignment. Of course, I’m seeing the students that come in to the Writing Center; maybe there are many more students who value the assignment; I really, really hope so, because I think that the assignment can be beneficial. However, I do worry.

Thus, I am still where I began: how do I empower my students? How do I make them authors? Much is still up in the air. One thing, though, is clear: they must want it.

Blog Response #9: Eddie and Me and Mullets

Cool stuff, this week’s article. I like the idea of a multi-genre research paper. Again, as I alluded to in my last post, that’s the kind of stuff that I grew up doing in my primary, secondary, and higher education. I like it.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that I was doing a report on one of my life’s passions, guitar-playing. (This’ll be fun.)

It started out innocuously enough, of course. My first guitar teacher was a really nice guy--so much so, in fact, that he'd auditioned to be Donny Osmond's guitarist. Too bad he never taught me this one:



...or, on second thought, it's probably better that he didn't teach me that...

But no discussion of guitar-playing would be complete, of course, without mention of Eddie Van Halen, of whom my first teacher was a devotee. Here's one of Eddie's most interesting moments, playing a Steinberger TransTrem guitar, which allows the whole guitar to be transposed up or down and remain in tune. Thus, because of his equipment, I can NEVER play this song, because one of these guitars costs thousands and thousands of dollars--if you can find one, because they're not made anymore.



The interesting thing is that, after learning to play that crazy stuff (well, I could never play it very WELL), I kinda had to unlearn that in order to get some real emotion going. (And, seeing as how I was, in many regards, every bit the angst-ridden teenager of yore...) Consider this band, Unbroken, a hardcore band from the San Diego area, whose concert (not this particular concert) once almost cost me my life (you can see why) (ah, the foibles of youth.) In another one of their songs, "Razor," they actually subvert the whole punk genre and throw in some Morrissey riffs. This one's a bit more illustrative, though.



I still want to have a Les Paul Custom, thanks to that band. Black Les Paul Customs just look BAD.

Another band that broke that mold was Texas is the Reason, one of the best band names ever:



Those guys were big proponents that the Kennedy Assassination was a conspiracy theory--on their concert sweatshirts, they printed diagrams of the so-called "magic bullet theory," proving (in their minds, at least) that the accepted version of Kennedy's death is physically impossible.

Lately, though, I've been getting back to my roots--which, in my case, means Brian May. Brian May was the guitarist for Queen, and his solos still rank among some of the most melodic in rock. His unique tone was created by his fingers (duh) and his "Red Special," a homemade guitar that used, among other things, pieces of an old fireplace, a knitting needle, and motorcycle parts. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest vocalists of all time--and, by, all time, I mean since Adam ate a transgressive lunch.)



See, my teachers always wanted me to play the blues, and I understand why, since the blues formed the basis of all our modern pop music. However, I prefer Rush:



...which, of course, features a riff based on basic pentatonic scale movement. So, in a way, it IS the blues. Ha! I win!

While I realize that I haven't done much in this post aside from show a bunch of pirated videos (although, they're being used for educational purposes, so that makes it okay, right?), I can easily see how someone could fill in the blanks between these videos and make a convincing argument about something. Thus, I'm fine with the idea of the multimodal personal report. I think it'd be fun. I mean, I certainly had fun with all of these clips...

...wait, we need another mullet...and good guitar...

Blog Response #8: Why Are We Having This Argument?

Well, perhaps that title isn’t fair, because we’re obviously having this argument because somebody out there is against their students using technology. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with new technologies in the classroom. Back in high school, I was the kid who was always trying to figure out how to make a video to fulfill an assignment. (Well, not always, but enough to where it got a little old, all the editing and filming and costuming and wondering if Eric Yeh, who had the editing equipment, would get the freaking thing done on time.) Technology—that is, producing new multimodal texts—really enhanced my learning experience. I want my students to have the same opportunities.

That isn’t to say, of course, that I have been very accepting of text messaging—and here is why. By and large, the technologies mentioned in the introduction help students convey their thoughts to their audience(s). However, text messaging is, I feel, still a nascent technology. There have been many, many instances where miscommunication has resulted from a bad text message. Even if a text message gets its point across, the message usually has to be so abbreviated that the intrinsic pathos is lost. For example, I once had a friend announce via a mass-mailed text message that he and his wife had lost a child—it was stillborn. I didn’t have his phone number programmed into my cell phone, so, when the message arrived, I had a random phone number telling me a heartbreakingly tragic story. (It wasn’t until months later that I found out who it was, since I didn’t see the friend for a while.)

And I don’t think that this is a case of “old man Tucker doesn’t get texting lingo.” I’ve heard similar things from other people. However, if the time arrives when texting can actually help people get their point across, I’m all for it. In the meantime, I think even students are struggling with it, as evidenced by their use of funky abbreviations that even they don’t understand sometimes.

Okay, time for a quote:

The more channels students (and writers generally) have to select from when composing and exchanging meaning, the more resources they have at their disposal for being successful communicators. Aural and video compositions sometimes reveal and articulate meanings students struggle to articulate with words; audio and visual compositions carry different kinds of meanings that words are not good at capturing. It is the thinking, decision making, and creative problem solving involved in creating meaning through any modality that provide the long-lasting and useful lessons students can carry into multiple communicative situations. (3-4)

Amen to that, I say. Let’s use the freaking (that’s two freakings in the same paper!) computer already. And video. And cell-phone video. And text-messaging, as soon as that catches up with what we want it to do.

Blogger...

...really gave me heck for that last post...I hope the formatting is legible...kinda ironic, given the subject...

Blog Response #7: Hyper! Texts!

I have to hand it to Sheldon: last week’s classroom discussion really dovetailed into the reading we were assigned. The article was interesting—for its content, yes, but also for its decidedly hypertextual design. Hypertext fiction—and hypertext documents, in general—is one of my pet research subjects. I just wrote a paper on hypertextuality in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example. (No, I don’t know what grade I got on it yet. Maybe hypertext fiction won’t be one of my research interests for very long, if the paper falls on its hypertextual face.)

Usually, when discussing hypertext writing, I like to focus on the form itself and the options that it opens up for the reader. For example, in Absalom, Absalom! (and you’ll forgive me if a crib a bit from what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately), the different strands of narratorial perspective give the reader different—and differing—options: which way does the reader want the story to go? Who do they want to emerge as the hero? The villain? Do they even want to have a hero or a villain? I like the control that hypertext gives the reader. It’s a little scary for a writer, sure, to think that the reader isn’t going to interpret your story the way that you want. However, I think that’s inevitable, hypertext or no hypertext.

Anyway, what this all made me think about was our discussion on Monday, wherein we were talking about the academic bias against text-messaging and other forms of communication embraced by the young whippersnappers these days. If anybody understands the notion of hypertext—without knowing what the word hypertext means, of course—it’s those young whippersnappers. For example, when they choose to send a text message, there is a lot of cultural capital required to 1) write a text message, and 2) know how to interpret the text message when it arrives. They need to know who they’re writing to; they need to know the technological limitations—or abilities—of their cellphone (and the cellphone of the person they’re texting); they need to make sure that the person they’re trying to contact can put all the disparate bits and pieces of words that constitute text message language together into a coherent thought. Putting all these ideas together—all while trying to communicate an actual message—could be considered a kind of hypertextuality.

There’s an interesting point that the article brings up, and that’s that the ancient rhetorical canon of delivery has re-emerged into modern discourse with the addition of today’s technology. The author notes:

Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that’s so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportunities than the creator of a hypertext […]. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits—and different media permit different arrangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext composers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these arrangements is quite different—a difference of kind, not degree. (317)

Technology, then, enables delivery to be raised (although many teachers would probably say lowered) into the realm of hypertext because of all the arrangements that the aforementioned technology makes possible. I think that’s pretty darn nifty, myself. Never really thought of it that way.

Of course, the author hints at the future of writing, as well:

The third source-what Leu calls “envisionments of new literacy potentials within new technologies”—is provocative. Here is what he is referring to: the ability of someone to take a given technology and find a use for it that may be at odds with its design (319).

I’ll just have to think about that one for a while.

Blog Response #6: I Read! I'm GOOD!

More than any article we have read thus far, I think that our sixth foray into the world of pedagogical/composition theory this semester addresses the connection between literacy and perceived morality. It’s an interesting idea, to be sure, one that I’d like to explore further.

So I will.

Growing up in Southern California (and, yes, I do capitalize “Southern,” as it is another country—nay, world—altogether), I was thrust into a unique situation upon entering my primary education at Esplanade Elementary School. It was my first and, in many ways, my favorite elementary school. (Later I was sent to a so-called “magnet” school, La Veta Elementary School, which was pretty good, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for good ol’ Esplanade.) Esplanade was unique for its demographic—its school boundaries encompassed neighborhoods both wealthy and modest. In Orange County, modest often means Latino.

I had no problem with it. Really, I thought it was great, the way we celebrated Latino—particularly Mexican—culture in school. However, it gives me shame to think that, at the same time that I was celebrating Latino culture in school, I shared many of the prejudices common to Southern California. For example, as my mother would drive me to Esplanade, we would pass a street corner where many Latino immigrants stood around, waiting to work as day-laborers. I remember it offending me; I would comment on it later, to friends.

Again, I remember this with shame. Now, the years having gone by and my experience broadened, I feel bad for those day-laborers—it’s a tough road to walk, indeed. I remember when, living in Costa Rica, I saw day-laborers from Nicaragua driven around by the dozen in the beds of open-back trucks; their work was long, sweaty, dangerous. I imagine that, in California, the situation couldn’t have been much better. I remember once that an acquaintance of mine laughingly recalled a prank he pulled on a friend; he had hired a day-laborer to dig a hole in the lawn of his friend. When the friend arrived home to find his lawn replaced by a giant hole, the day-laborer was told—in no uncertain words, I’m sure—to get lost. It was, for that poor man, a day lost.

Why all this hostility toward the day-laborers, many of whom worked harder than the people in the cars who passed them? There was, I believe, a perception that they lacked morality due to their lack of education, of literacy: they didn’t speak English, first of all, and they were poor, which was something of a transgression in Southern California.

In other words, since my youth, I have been aware of the connection between education and perceived morality, and I appreciate that this article explores reasons why that connection exists. One passage particularly caught my eye; describing the connecting between morality and education, the author says:

In The Literacy Myth, Harvey Graff, for instance, exposes a subtle transformation in the ideological basis of nineteenth-century literacy in Canada. In a church-dominated society, reading was used as a medium for moral training; one read in order to learn right behavior. Eventually economic and state interests eclipsed religious ones, yet moral connotations continued to cling to literacy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ability to read was no longer regarded as an avenue to morality but rather as an indication of moral behavior itself (just as illiteracy became-in and of itself an indication of antisocial or immoral behavior). (654)

While I can see the logic of this explanation—that is, the gradual progression from literacy-as-pathway to literacy-as-righteousness—I confess that, at least in my experience, the bias against the illiterate went deeper. I never consciously thought to myself, “They are illiterate; they are evil.” The bias had become entrenched in my society to the point that nothing needed to be said (although, believe me, plenty was).

The question, then, is how to remove this bias from society. I don’t know. Perhaps a more manageable question would be How do we stop the illiterate from thinking they’re evil? Time and time again, I run into people while teaching whose self-esteem is next to nothing. “I’m terrible at writing,” they say, apologizing profusely before we even begin reading their essays, and I wonder if it goes beyond the typical students’ nervousness. I wonder if, throughout their lives, they have been treated as morally deficient because of their lack of skills.

I have tutored students who, for their Eng 099 class, had to write papers about how their acquired literacy. I the time, I admit that I found the assignment somewhat pointless. Now, however, I see its worth: it convinces students of their worth.

All the, uh, Essay’s a Stage

This article is, for me, perhaps the most revolutionary of the articles we’ve read, if only for its progression-through-unlearning attitude. No, that’s not quite correct—the article certainly isn’t asking us to unlearn anything; rather, it’s asking us to consider that, as we progress into a society increasingly dominated by hypertextuality and technology-based discourse, our methods of composition may return to those advocated by rhetors from antiquity. This is stated most clearly when the authors suggest that “[c]ertainly, we will need to pay more attention to the fifth canon of rhetoric, delivery” (246). For years, composition assignments doled out to students have focused on the first three canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style (by which they meant something akin to our English words grammar or punctuation or correctness)—at the cost of the last two canons, memory and delivery. Thus, the vast majority (I’d say) of composition assignments in many high school (and even university) English classes are situated in a stylistic vacuum, with instructors focusing on the arrangement of the paragraphs, the correctness of the grammar and punctuation, and whether the students follow the “proper” steps for constructing introductions (do they have a three-part thesis, do they set up the arrangement of the essay) and conclusions (do they restate the thesis). Thus, when many students come to us, we get the standard five-paragraph essay: easy to follow, easy to grade, easy to forget.

By incorporating the sense of performance which the authors advocate, the students may gain perspective on their writing; that is, what is the rhetorical situation demanded by their audience, not necessarily the course instructor? What appeals will best work? What is the timely thing to say? As the authors insist, quoting a student:

In Todd’s words: “The substance is the difference.” Important, too, is students’ sense of a rhetorical situation and the presence of an audience for their writing. As Paolo puts it, “[P]ersonal writing has more of my style and is more liberal with grammar, though not because it is writing without conventions or rules. Instead, Paolo makes choices that are deliberate and planned, with a clear sense of audience and rhetorical purpose. “I’m willing to break rules more often in order to get a specific effect I desire,” Paolo explains […]. (231)

Thus, while students still learn the rules of effective writing, they also learn when it is appropriate to unlearn those rules, or ignore them—or, yes, use them to the letter of the law. By letting the students perform—and, by perform, I mean that the students can write in a variety of media in a variety of genres in a variety of situations—they can experiment and gain a better sense of what each individual situation demands. They gain, to use the word that my students toss around so casually, a sense of writing’s flow.

Ultimately, by allowing students the freedom to participate in and out of class in a variety of rhetorical modes, they will become, as the authors note, “rhetors in both a classical and a distinctly modern—even postmodern—sense: individuals who, singly and in groups, participate in numerous communication situations that involve a dazzling, sometimes staggering, array of literate practices” (245). And, really, what more could we want for our students? While we would love to think that many of our students will go on to careers in humanistic studies that allow them to think large thoughts steeped in theory, many have no desire—but, with this training, they will be able to perform whatever they want to be.

(Credit to T.A. Noonan for suggesting the use of “perform” in that last sentence.)

Can I Give a Smiley Face?

Teacher response is, undoubtedly, a primary source of stress for me when I’m grading papers. Obviously, I want to encourage my students, because I recognize the immense stress that graded papers bring them. Getting a paper back is horrifying, is something that students dread. In many ways, it’s very similar to the way that Christians view the Second Coming. It’ll be great, if you’ve been good, but, judging from past experience, maybe you haven’t been as good as you’d have liked to have been, so it might be really, really bad and/or hot.

NOTE: Please do not think that I’m comparing myself with deity. Such is not my intent. Rather, I simply mean to illustrate the intensity of emotion that surrounds receiving a graded paper.

Thus, I try to take it seriously, and I appreciate articles like this that give varying theories about how to write student comments. Firstly, I am appalled by the mean-spirited and downright nasty comments that the author selected from his primary sources. Again, the student ego is a fragile and delicate thing, something that must not be crushed. The students, even as seniors, are just beginning their collective journey into adulthood and education. A nasty comment could derail them. Perhaps we say, in our supposed wisdom, that we want to derail them, to crush their ego or arrogance and “wake them up” to their situation of poor grammatical awareness. I disagree. There are better ways to do it. Properly done, a students’ ego can be used to motivate them.

Thus, the question remains: How do we motivate students with proper comments? I’m a proponent of being short. Of course, I realize that the authors may disagree with me. Also, the authors and I may disagree over what, exactly, constitutes “short.” They state, “A teacher with too many students, too many papers to grade, can pay only small attention to each one, and small attention indeed is what many of these papers got. A quarter of them had no personal comments at all, a third of them had no real rhetorical responses, and only 5% of them had lengthy, engaged comments of more than 100 words” (214). This attitude stands in stark contrast to the instructions which a friend of mine received; she was told to keep comments quick and to-the-point. Frankly, I think that the authors may be expecting a bit much—I doubt that students pay attention to comments over one hundred words (at least at first glance; if encouraged, the students may finally read the entire comment paragraph). While I certainly don’t believe in skimping on comments, I worry about overloading students; I also worry about practical issues, such as my time. Writing that much would take a long time. I hope this doesn’t make me seem lazy.

The authors are absolutely correct when they admonish us to “determin[e] those genres and tropes of response we tend to privilege [that] perhaps we can begin to learn how our students ‘read’ these teacherly tropes, which seem so obvious and helpful to us but may not be so easily deciphered by those still striving to enter the community we take for granted” (219). What comments do students look for when scanning our response paragraph? What words stand out to them? Maybe it is some misguided sense of making these “tropes” stand out that drives teachers to make mean-spirited comments. Again, I hope to find polite—yet effective—comments that students will respond to. I’m open to suggestions.

On Textbooks, Profits, and Raw Utter Unadulterated Massive Blasted Idiocy

So the title's a little bombastic. Hmm.

Man, did this reading resonate with me. It’s instructions were clear, and the instructions were noteworthy. Indeed, allow me to create a parallel with a more domestic situation in order to illustrate, what I feel, is the author’s message: Imagine, for a moment, a kid who’s taking the piano. He’s actually pretty good—he plays Beethoven, Mozart, the big guys. However, the songs that his piano teacher assigns him are seemingly random, without order or reason; sure, the songs get more difficult as time goes by, but, due to a lack of context, he often wonders why he has to play “Funereal Dirge No. 666” by some unknown composer out of a Soviet-bloc nation. (Not, of course, that he has anything against Soviet-bloc nations, of course, but the music can be, on occasion, uh, bleak.) Bored out of his mind, he finally abandons the piano for the guitar, for he wants to rock the proverbial house. He is happy.

However, what happens then? He progresses into guitar study and finds—could it be?—the context for his piano instruction? Syncopation, pentatonic scales—all this draws upon his piano training, and—in a flurry, it happens—he understands. It all makes sense. If only he could have understood the context of what his teachers had been trying to teach him with the Slavic death marches, if only he could’ve known that the piano was really helping him, if only!

As I am prone to do, I exaggerate somewhat in this—uh, fictional—story. (Yep. Totally false. Yessir.) However, I think it demonstrates our author’s point, which is that many of today’s student-age learners, be them piano students or composition students, are, sadly, not given much instruction in theory, in context. Thus, when evaluating textbooks, we must pay attention to whether the textbooks have any particular aim in their instruction—that is, whether their pedagogical choices are motivated by theory or whether they simply flail about, teaching whatever the author feels is needed in his/her judgment. As the author here states, “The problem with the partial canons and the modes is that they do not have any aim. They are cut off from meaning because they are cut off from pointing forward to any life outside the text. They point back only to themselves and so implode meaninglessly” (Welch 275). In other words, instruction for the sake of instruction is no instruction at all.

The flip-side of this idea, though, is encouraging: If students can be taught the context of what we’re teaching, the why-and-wherefore of the homework that we assign, perhaps they will be more eager to do it. Perhaps not, of course—when I (I mean, our hypothetical student) was taking piano, some of the songs that I was assigned to learn were so unbelievably boring that no amount of musical theory could ameliorate the situation. But the theory does help.

What is the solution? Should we create a textbook that is entirely devoted to theory? Should we have a textbook that features articles that students find enjoyable and/or “fun”? Welch’s article advocates that:

[r]ules for dominant-culture English can be relegated to a pamphlet that not only instructs students in the conventions of this dialect but that explains the implications of power, authority, and social mobility that go with mastery of his dialect.

We must begin with these changes in current textbooks. Their currently enormously persuasive effect, in their large numbers if from nothing else, is to show writing students that language is banal, boring, and not central to anyone’s life. (279)

Whatever the solution, something needs to be done, ‘cause I’ve seen my fair share of composition textbooks, and they are almost universally boring. (The book we had last semester was okay. The articles really got the students’ hackles up.) (I like hackles.)

Blog Response #2: Genre. Bent.

The question of genre is one that has intrigued—plagued, really—me for quite some time now, ever since I took a class whose purpose was to define form. Basically, we had to see where the line between fiction and poetry lay; it was a difficult class, one that many people were quick to label as “experimental” (my, I’m using lots of buzzwords here, ain’t I?), but it wasn’t, really—it was just a question of exploring genre. Indeed, the very first essay we had to write in that class (and one that I really didn’t do very well on) was that question which Amy J. Devitt is trying to answer—what is genre?

It was hard precisely because of the problem that Devitt probes—so often, we define genre by the end form of a piece of writing, when what we should be examining is the situation and/or motivation for creating that very piece. It can be difficult for students, and I can really relate to students who struggle to understand an assignment’s particular generic “space.” (Another buzzword. Man, I’m on a roll today.) For example, when I was in that class about form, four other people in the class—there were only six of us, including the professor—were poets. There was one other fiction writer and, admittedly, poetry serves as a better jumping-off point when discussing form, since that’s one definition of poetry, a definition that we could banter about: writing with form.

When I was asked to write stuff that was more poetry than fiction, I balked. I certainly wanted to, because I loved much of the stuff that we were discussing in class, like prose poetry, that bent the rules. I wanted to try, to excel—such was my mindset. However, I was grasping for an anchor, something that would help me understand this new exigence that confronted me. I really relate to what Devitt says:

“Since the genre constructs the situation, students will not be able to respond appropriately to assigned situations unless they know the appropriate genre. What we often diagnose as ignorance of a situation or inability to imagine themselves in another situation may in fact be ignorance of a genre or inability to write a genre they have not sufficiently read: they may feel great love but be unable to write a love sonnet.”

How do we, as instructors, help students overcome this problem? Honestly, I’m at a bit of a loss. Aside from simply having the students read, read, read and write, write, write, I don’t really see any way. Perhaps that’s the unspoken message in Devitt’s article: we must really put the students to work. I’m down.

Cyclical Truth, Linear Truth, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

“Here,” Douglas Hesse states, “is the splendid paradox of postmodern theory invoked in the name of critical pedagogy. On the one hand critical theorists challenge the existence of foundational truths, denying as natural the imperative to ‘do’ anything. And I agree. Yet on the other they must invoke, seemingly as foundational, the value of critical exchange” (230). And herein lies the point of Hesse’s argument: what is “proper,” anyway? Pardon my lame cheekiness, but I deliberately started this response with a quote to prove this point. What, starting a paragraph with a quote? Starting a paper with a quote? Where did I learn to write, anyway?

(The answer to this, of course, is that I didn’t really learn to write, since I grew up in California and much of what we associate with learning to write just doesn’t get taught. You know how I learned English grammar? I learned Spanish. I exaggerate only slightly.)

When I began reading the article, I assumed that the author would be addressing the oft-encountered oppositional decoding pattern exhibited by students in college composition courses. It seemed that Hesse was arguing for greater empathy and, even, compassion on the part of composition instructors, since instructors sometimes lose sight of just how new and challenging college reading material can be. However, by the end of the article, I was left wondering what Hesse’s argument was—that is, what was he trying to get us to think? By saying, more or less, that a critical pedagogy-based approach to teaching largely destroys the notion of an absolute anything—that some things are, by their nature, essential to human knowledge—then Hesse allows the reader to ignore what he’s saying.

Again, I exaggerate slightly. At the end of the article, Hesse does indicate that he believes there are exceptions to this idea, that a person who teaches chemistry, say, is responsible for knowing chemistry. To me, though, his concession comes as too little too late. After spending several pages discussing why undergraduate students and graduate students—and, as is the implication, everyone—need to understand that their perception is limited by their lack of experience, that they can’t judge texts as well as someone with more experience (something which creates a “foundation” upon which to base an opinion), he then talks about how educational foundations are, on the whole, unreliable, until his aforementioned concession. Thus, the concession feels gimmicky to me, as if he knows that he’s already shot himself in the foot, but he wants to soldier on.

This is too bad, because there is truth in what he says, truth that we’ve seen ever since Shakespeare in the Bush became widespread in anthropology circles. Interpreting a text is a matter of discourse community membership, of one’s past experience, of one’s lack of experience, etc. Resistance to a newly introduced text is a result of all these, sure, so I understand why Hesse broached the topic. He opened up a can of worms, though, and instead I would’ve liked to have seen a discussion of creating a classroom environment that’s conducive to helping students accept new ideas. (He did this somewhat when he talked about comparing his graduate students, albeit without malice, to freshmen.) (Note: When trying to get students to accept a new text, I certainly wouldn’t recommend comparing them to freshmen, unless they are freshmen, and even that’s a little risky.)

This is a test.

Sheldon, are you watching?