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...