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...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.