Over lunch with a colleague the other day, I tried sanity checking my semester thus far. What better way to test whether things are working than to say them out loud between meatball subs and people we trust. Perhaps there's a magic to naming the things we're struggling with -- putting our worries into words -- that makes them poof into vanishing. Because of course, that's exactly what happened.
All of a sudden, in both of my writing classes, things started making sense. To the students. And to me. And I started thinking less about whether or not my materials were too hard or not interesting and thinking more about how true it is that things take time.
But something else came out of that impromptu lunch chat. Our conversations got me thinking about why I have chosen to move so far away from personal writing in first-year composition classes. I write all of my assignment prompts so carefully in this regard -- to leave the personal approach open, but to never under any circumstances require any personal content or information.
I spent the last week or so thinking about this choice. As a writer, I enjoy personal writing and in fact have engaged in personal writing to deal with the world most of the time. In fact, in the first-year composition classroom, starting at the personal makes so much sense. How can we understand the world, for example, if we can't understand ourselves in the world.
My mentors, perhaps, lent me this leaning. But try as I might to unearth the precise moment for my current position on the personal, I could not find its location. And then several unconnected things happened. One of those things was a lecture that I attended regarding LGBTQ issues in the region of the world where I live, which brought back a flood of emotions about this notion of 'sharing things about ourselves as a requirement for grades' and why I am really so opposed to that kind of classroom activity.
There are always going to be learners who will not want to share things about themselves. I was one of those students, and so I don't take the topic lightly. I was the author of an anonymous blog for over a decade for many issues related with this topic. I was one of those people. Full stop. Not wanting to share things about ourselves with a group of people we don't know and don't trust -- especially things we will receive grades for -- is a reaction that far too many students might have. And I'm not willing to put students into dangerous positions or ask them to compromise themselves or, in some cases, lie about who they are and how they spend their time.
It didn't occur to me right there during lunch. But there it was when I thought about the many people that I've loved who have had to live life full of lies and pain because they didn't fit in. Because being who they are could mean exile at the best of times. Death at the worst.
It occurred to me when I thought about how long it was that I lived my life like a lie, because I was too afraid to say exactly who I was. It took me 30 years to grow into myself. And I certainly wasn't ready to make that happen during freshman comp, all those years ago.
Is there a place for personal writing in the composition classroom? Of course. But like all things we ask our students to perform and try out, it should always be their choice.
on rethinking plagiarism
This morning, I've been thinking about the role of new media in my composition classroom. I got stuck, for some reason, on the issue of plagiarism.
Copying or using other people's thoughts, words, ideas, etc. has changed so much in the past decade, or so. And while us old schoolers might have been panic-stricken enough to contemplate writing out, word for word, that article we found in a dusty volume of Funk and Wagnals, we cannot assume that our students are any more inclined to do so simply because they have the cut and paste option at the click of their fingertips. It might be easier technologically to cheat, but the argument doesn't follow that it is any easier morally to do so.
The whole scenario is just much more complicated in this "information age." Encountering words printed on paper in real books lined up on shelves in libraries with rules and order that make us feel a bit like foreigners treading on sacred ground is different than all of these words on screens. The whole sanctity of the book has been dropped into the bin. And while we might argue that there's no reason to be precious about our printed texts -- that we should not regard them as holier than our electronic versions, we do have to learn how to read and navigate our electronic texts. We need to understand what is out there and how we can tell the difference between our sources. And also the differences between the texts we produce.
As students, thinkers, and writers, we need to be conscious of both what we're putting out and what we're taking in. And perhaps this moment is where I need to start spending more time with my students.
Plagiarism has never made that much sense to any of the classes I've taught. Not in 1999. And not in 2010. They know that cheating is bad. Some of them will inevitably try to pass off another person's work as their own. Some of them will re-use text from another source in an inadvertent way. But, I wonder if there isn't some other way to make the concept more a part of the world they are already living in. To use the right language. To talk, instead of plagiarism, about copyright, public domain, open source, and creative commons. These concepts, words, terms, are part of their worlds as the born-digital generation.
As a digital archivist, I balk at the idea of privileging the physical artifact over the digital object. Why then am I grasping at these highly traditional artifacts of academia, when more obvious and appropriate language and conventions exist?
Copying or using other people's thoughts, words, ideas, etc. has changed so much in the past decade, or so. And while us old schoolers might have been panic-stricken enough to contemplate writing out, word for word, that article we found in a dusty volume of Funk and Wagnals, we cannot assume that our students are any more inclined to do so simply because they have the cut and paste option at the click of their fingertips. It might be easier technologically to cheat, but the argument doesn't follow that it is any easier morally to do so.
The whole scenario is just much more complicated in this "information age." Encountering words printed on paper in real books lined up on shelves in libraries with rules and order that make us feel a bit like foreigners treading on sacred ground is different than all of these words on screens. The whole sanctity of the book has been dropped into the bin. And while we might argue that there's no reason to be precious about our printed texts -- that we should not regard them as holier than our electronic versions, we do have to learn how to read and navigate our electronic texts. We need to understand what is out there and how we can tell the difference between our sources. And also the differences between the texts we produce.
As students, thinkers, and writers, we need to be conscious of both what we're putting out and what we're taking in. And perhaps this moment is where I need to start spending more time with my students.
Plagiarism has never made that much sense to any of the classes I've taught. Not in 1999. And not in 2010. They know that cheating is bad. Some of them will inevitably try to pass off another person's work as their own. Some of them will re-use text from another source in an inadvertent way. But, I wonder if there isn't some other way to make the concept more a part of the world they are already living in. To use the right language. To talk, instead of plagiarism, about copyright, public domain, open source, and creative commons. These concepts, words, terms, are part of their worlds as the born-digital generation.
As a digital archivist, I balk at the idea of privileging the physical artifact over the digital object. Why then am I grasping at these highly traditional artifacts of academia, when more obvious and appropriate language and conventions exist?
When I should be marking papers
I've been delaying marking student work all morning. In between doing nothing and something, I ran across a piece of writing about my twitchy attitudes as an undergraduate. So, I started playing with pages and putting together some short pieces. It all needs more work. Which means, it's probably time to start that grading.
.
.
My Homework is Burning
My students don't like homework. Not only do they not like homework, even though I work hard trying to make every exercise interesting or at least relevant to their overall goals and skills in the class, they don't do their homework.
Sigh.
I spent weeks feeling irritated about this problem. I mean, it is their education. And I cannot count the number of times I have said "your choice" in response to the dreaded questions about whether or not something would count toward their grade. "Your grade," I always scoff, "What about what you are here for?" Sigh, again. Oh, god, the learning.
But the learning is the big difficult part. No matter what we're teaching, I think we all have our moments where we wax nostalgic. Where we somehow convince ourselves that when we were students (yawn) we actually cared about our educations. We respected our professors. And we wanted to learn . . . no, wait, we were eager to learn, nay, dying to do it. We did our assignments without having to be asked and never complained (deep breath).
You get the picture.
And much like our students, we lull ourselves into a false sense of reality. If we were honest, we'd remember that we hated some assignments. That we did complain and try to get by with minimal work when we could. That we weren't always impressed with our professor's lesson plans or lectures. That we had trouble asking questions and, sometimes, even, wanted someone to tell us 'what the right answer is.' We might remember, that we are, in fact, human too.
Rather than work against the students (and against myself), I have been working on alternatives that make sense to address the 'we didn't know what we were supposed to do' for homework phenomenon. I have a schedule document hosted on the course website that outlines every homework assignment, among other constant reminders. But these traditional methods were not working. They still seemed to never know about and never do their homework.
So, I sat down and thought about how my students interact with the world. They do not, probably, spend a lot of time reading schedules or working from documents like the one I created. Instead, they look at feeds and digests and tumblers. They get text messages and post things to one another on Facebook. So, I sat down and thought, why don't I just feed them their homework?
The texts I create should be more like the texts that I teach.
This is your homework.
Sigh.
I spent weeks feeling irritated about this problem. I mean, it is their education. And I cannot count the number of times I have said "your choice" in response to the dreaded questions about whether or not something would count toward their grade. "Your grade," I always scoff, "What about what you are here for?" Sigh, again. Oh, god, the learning.
But the learning is the big difficult part. No matter what we're teaching, I think we all have our moments where we wax nostalgic. Where we somehow convince ourselves that when we were students (yawn) we actually cared about our educations. We respected our professors. And we wanted to learn . . . no, wait, we were eager to learn, nay, dying to do it. We did our assignments without having to be asked and never complained (deep breath).
You get the picture.
And much like our students, we lull ourselves into a false sense of reality. If we were honest, we'd remember that we hated some assignments. That we did complain and try to get by with minimal work when we could. That we weren't always impressed with our professor's lesson plans or lectures. That we had trouble asking questions and, sometimes, even, wanted someone to tell us 'what the right answer is.' We might remember, that we are, in fact, human too.
Rather than work against the students (and against myself), I have been working on alternatives that make sense to address the 'we didn't know what we were supposed to do' for homework phenomenon. I have a schedule document hosted on the course website that outlines every homework assignment, among other constant reminders. But these traditional methods were not working. They still seemed to never know about and never do their homework.
So, I sat down and thought about how my students interact with the world. They do not, probably, spend a lot of time reading schedules or working from documents like the one I created. Instead, they look at feeds and digests and tumblers. They get text messages and post things to one another on Facebook. So, I sat down and thought, why don't I just feed them their homework?
The texts I create should be more like the texts that I teach.
This is your homework.
Filling the Room
At some point in our mad-dash-as-newly-married-people to buy a house, we saw something on one of those HGTV House Hunter type shows that stuck with us: the theory of filling the room.
Most people won't see that it's a bedroom, for example, if there isn't a bed in it.
Teaching feels like an exercise in this theory, sometimes. Unless you can show them the thing, then it doesn't exist and won't probably make its way into their essays or writing projects or skills sets, in general. And, like all learning and teaching give-and-takes, some rooms are easier to fill than others.
This morning, when my first-year writing class met in peer review workshops for the first time, I found myself trying to explain how essays that are highly-personal in nature can also have a more universal appeal. We had read Michael Chabon's Secret Skin a few days before, a reflection on childhood and super heroes and the stuff that actually ends up making us who we are. But as an example text, it hadn't really helped the students figure out how they were going to make their personal reflections matter to, well, anyone else.
It started creeping in as a general concern. And then, all I could see were kitchen sinks piling up where a headboard should be.
Before class was over and our working groups broke for the day, I threw out the planned homework assignment for something different: to find some piece of writing that appeals to them, for whatever reason. I am hoping that a group discussion of their pieces and trying to isolate the personal and the universal appeal will help them understand the concept more clearly.
I posted my own response to their discussion board, partly as example text and partly to test my own notions and meditations on the subject.
If anything, I hope it puts the kitchen sinks back where they belong.
Most people won't see that it's a bedroom, for example, if there isn't a bed in it.
Teaching feels like an exercise in this theory, sometimes. Unless you can show them the thing, then it doesn't exist and won't probably make its way into their essays or writing projects or skills sets, in general. And, like all learning and teaching give-and-takes, some rooms are easier to fill than others.
This morning, when my first-year writing class met in peer review workshops for the first time, I found myself trying to explain how essays that are highly-personal in nature can also have a more universal appeal. We had read Michael Chabon's Secret Skin a few days before, a reflection on childhood and super heroes and the stuff that actually ends up making us who we are. But as an example text, it hadn't really helped the students figure out how they were going to make their personal reflections matter to, well, anyone else.
It started creeping in as a general concern. And then, all I could see were kitchen sinks piling up where a headboard should be.
Before class was over and our working groups broke for the day, I threw out the planned homework assignment for something different: to find some piece of writing that appeals to them, for whatever reason. I am hoping that a group discussion of their pieces and trying to isolate the personal and the universal appeal will help them understand the concept more clearly.
I posted my own response to their discussion board, partly as example text and partly to test my own notions and meditations on the subject.
I was thinking about your topic, after leaving class this afternoon. And I was trying desperately hard to come up with a topic or an essay or something to illustrate our point: writing that is both personal, but that reaches out in some way to a wider audience.
My friend Margaret Roach is a master gardener, and I read the posts that she writes for her website, A Way to Garden, almost every day. I am not an avid gardener, although I would like to be. There is just something so beautiful about the way that Margaret writes about gardening and her love of it and her philosophy on life that I really enjoy. It appeals to me, even though I am not a gardener, and I don't intend to use any of her tips or hints or reminders, because there is something inherently more within the stories that she tells -- about living a fulfilled life -- than just when to plant your onion bulbs.
Here is an example of what I mean, "Birthday Tradition: An Old Essay from the Old Gal," which is about death and life and getting older and feeling, as Margaret so wonderfully puts it, like "I need more time." The piece is about Margaret and her real birthday and getting older and reflections on her thoughts earlier in life, but she has included universal questions that might appeal to any of us who have these same kinds of questions.
Similarly, I often read the food blog, Orangette, written by Seattle based foodie and writer, Molly Wizenberg. In the three or four years that I have been a reader, I have never attempted to make one of Wizenberg's recipes. Although beautifully written and almost always food themed, I do not visit Orangette for tips on how to make leeks into soup or how to bake a cake. I mostly go there and read her posts, because I appreciate the way she tells such personal stories using food and memories and language. The appeal of her posts is that they sometimes make you want to bake a cake and hug your loved ones and write a memoir, all at the same time.
If anything, I hope it puts the kitchen sinks back where they belong.
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