Lindemann, Chapter 13

I found this chapter on developing writing assignments very helpful. She begins by saying “Because each composition represents a response to a specific “invitation” to write, the problem in many papers may be the fault, not of the writer, but of the assignment” (213). This point cannot be emphasized enough. For me, when I was teaching high school it was a trial and error process. I wished I had Lindemann’s advice back then, as it would have saved me a great deal of grief. For me, I was always in a rush to get my students to start writing that I did not often give my assignments the meticulous thought and preparation that it required. When this happens, as Lindemann also remarks, it causes confusion and does not yield the type of products the teacher wants. The most important aspect of developing writing assignments is to “encourage students to define progressively more complex rhetorical problems” (215). Hence, students should not be given the same types of assignments over and over again. I agree that when we don’t give students a rhetorical problem to tackle, that we are indeed wasting students’ time as they grapple with instead a “paper-writing problem” (215). Even though a knowledge of process pedagogy is important, I feel that this chapter is also of paramount importance because without effective writing assignments, students would not get practice in rhetoric and composition.

Trainor and Writing about Literature

“Throughout the academic year I spent at the high school, I observed two English classes taught by a woman I will call Elizabeth, a progressive, passionate teacher committed to her students and to social justice ideals”(83)  

High School is its own space with its own politics: academic and social. It’s the last frontier before students enter college, the work place- basically the real world. Trainor’s article makes this clear through the issue of race and insularity of the students within their town. Many of them, however, make it clear that they are not narrow minded but that racism does exist and they’ve had some connection to it; Ok, that’s a start. Literature, for this progressive teacher, is a way to expand the student’s exposure- or at least realize the lack there of-to other cultures; but the experiment, as I read it, falls short.

Progressive. Passionate. Committed. All great qualities to embody. But the whole “positive” movement/attitude/ideology seems to only keep the bias going. If everything is all sunshine and rainbows then it’s not a real representation of the real world; but what does this progressive teacher do, what does this article for that matter accomplish: well, it’s a good example of in-the-field observation, understanding that the students’ bias is complex enough to be studied through composition and literature, and that High School teaches more than the three Rs(four Rs), one for racism.  

Toni Morison- An example of exposing students to great writers writing in untraditional dialects, excluded experiences, and empathy for other human beings. When I think about reading material for students, I want things short enough so it can be read multiple times if needed, it’s not overwhelming , and usually a piece of literature: short stories or poems. But the selection process, and this is more towards my thesis, has to be more tactical. So maybe the problem lies in the selection; a practical alternative:

If I were to select a companion text to Morrison, but still talk about the themes that the progressive teacher wanted to cover, I would suggest James Baldwin’s Giovanni’ s Room: its narrated by a white man, written by a Black author, and deals with the discrimination of its white, gay, American protagonist experiencing expatriation.

What I want to do is find a common ground with the way students write about literature, possibly by giving them a chance to select their own material, not just their own writing prompts, and see if they can write/engage/appreciate/ relate/and expand  on the words of writers like Morrison.

Shari - Cauthen article

For Monday, April 14th, I came prepared on the Cauthen and Trailor pieces.  Sadly, Hotmail had put the email from Dr. Cauthen in my Junk folder.  So I saw it only in class on the 14th at 8:30pm, when Dr. C announced that everyone should have received his email with comments on blog entries and the reading assignment.

So per the Cauthen piece, I found it interesting what Sheila McIntyre said about why law school is difficult for women, ""Going to law school is learning to speak male as a second language, and speaking it fluently.'"  Perhaps all language to some extent is male dominated. Why is is "history" and not "herstory"?  Even in the French language, "la barbe" which is a beard, is a feminine word.  Why?  It is known in the business world, assertive and career-determined women and the language they use makes them be viewed as bitches.  Men could use the same language and be considered strong, go-getters, etc. Robin Lakoff at U.C. Berkeley has been looking at the differences in women's and men's discourse.

When I teach the English language, I do not address this side of language with my students.  Perhaps, I think that by keeping the belief that English is gender and sociolinguistically neutral, my students will believe the same. If my female students believe the English language has the power to keep them lower than men, then they may not really like using the language and not try to harness the power it for themselves. 

"One way of leavening this generalized aggression is the elaborate formality of the law school which seems to be, in turn, an object-lesson in what Cramton calls law's, "unreal professional model of detachment, non-involvement and insensitivity.'"  I can't help but think that this nature of law school is necessary as the law itself should be without sensitive bias and involvement.  Law school should not be personal.  And I can only imagine that medical school has a similar environment and culture. 

Many of my students have gone on to become lawyers.  Often they speak more than two languages.  Does that ability to speak more than one language (if it assumed that to know a language means to know a culture), even in the field of law, enable students to have a greater awareness of the starkness of the law field?

Trainor: emotional impact of surveys

Emotion will play an important part of the surveys and questions we will pose as we move forward with our teaching philosophies. No matter how impersonal you try to make a survey, when you ask students what they think about their own education or why they like/dislike some aspect of their personal life or exposures they are bound to let their emotions take the lead. This does not guarantee the best or certainly objective results. 

"As Megan Boler reminds us, education teaches social and moral values, and such teaching is inextricably tied to emotional control. Emotional control occurs through taken-for-granted practices, what Daniel Gross calls “technologies of emotion." As Gross writes, the contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions: emotions such as anger presume a public stage, and our most powerful emotional responses are constituted in the social world (2). Recent scholarship on emotion deconstructs many of its popular connotations: for example, that emotion is distinct from reason; that it is a private, individual experience; that it has psychological, but not social or ideological, roots."

A few pieces of Brodkey that caught my attention

    1)      Premises include: the theories of textuality and discursive resistance

a.       Brodkey focuses on Foucault’s use of discourse and ideology which I find interesting considering her case study highlights class differences that make me think of Marx more.  The negative associations a deterrent, maybe?

b.      I love this type of stuff.  I discuss it with my boss all the time, issues of class and privilege.  I want to have these conversations with everyone and for a while I thought I could.  For a while I’d say things and not realize their impact, their offense, their brutality, their assumption, their charge in the ears of middle class white people, especially when those people think they can relate to me (gets kinda awkward after and I usually end up feeling like a dick) .  I am constantly contemplating rhetorical awareness-  in my speech, position, clothing, environment, surroundings, associations, everything, but mostly my language in written and verbal forms.  I play tricks on myself in my head with people to see who can see through me, who can play with me, and who can’t play for shit. I need to explain a bit more since this a part of my teaching philosophy. I’ll try and make clearer my thoughts, try.

2)      “The letters were generated  in the discourse of education, since they were initiated by six white middle-class teachers (four women and two men) taking my graduate course on teaching basic writing and sustained by six white working-class women enrolled in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) class” (128)

a.       What is the difference between middle-class and working-class?  Is working class the lower class and if so, why not say it?  I get the same feeling as when Marx wasn’t mentioned cause I'm a "weirdo", like Don mentioned to Dora.  

b.      They are all white people.  Funny, when I was reading the correspondence pieces encountering the broken English, I envisioned people of color, colored people, minorities- are any of those politically correct? People that look like my Dad or most, wait, all the guys I’ve dated (does mentioning that mean I can use politically and unpolitically correct terms?).  I had forgotten that it was white people by the end and not until I’m writing this did I realize.

c.       How middle class is a teacher?  Isn’t a teacher working because they can’t afford anything because they get paid 40k a year.  Or 50 or 60 depending on your degrees, school, etc. etc.  So, is that middle class?  they need to be married or something like that, no?    I kept thinking, especially now and days, this line between working and middle class is stupid af because it’s kinda non-existent except in our heads.  Along with the authority of the teacher comes the reputation of authority and that means, as was mentioned, “professional class narcissism”.  Like, how awkward is it that you’re a “scholar” and yet you are in the same financial position as the student who no able write in tense or make sentence clar. 

d.      Side-stepping- that thing we do when we don’t want to really talk about something so we acknowledge it passive-aggressively.  Like Don did to Dora when she mentioned the death and murder.  I argue with many people about mechanics and grammar because my teaching philosophy does not… give standard academic English the weight and privilege many of my colleagues give it… they tell me, “so you won’t teach your students any of it in your class?  You’ll let them write like that- with fragments and tense issues, etc. etc.”  ….. ready for it…. YES. Maybe… now what?  You think I am not fit to teach? I think the same of you.  Interesting isn’t it?  I think we are fascinating, we at seemingly opposite ends although I see myself as you and me, whereas your reality is just you with a dash of me to "liven" up the classroom when not doing "real academic work". what was that meme sent to me on FB, jokingly of course, by friends of course----

   Back to my point…   so the teacher’s mastery of linguistics, rather SAE, allowed them to side-step the conversation instead of getting in the mud with Dora.  I thought- hey, this is like Facebook- when you press the “like” button to passively acknowledge a photo. Post, comment, etc.  The “like” button has many interpretations, I’d argue, and I believe this is one of them.  Who needs mastery over language when I can press “like”, or create a meme with my application that needs but a few words anyways? What mastery over SAE do I need then? But that is basic communication, Amanda, we are talking about preparing students for their careers.…. Yes, you are right..... just like an academic essay prepares our students for their careers..........  Hmmm

e.      “to the credit of the teachers who participated in this study, none took the usual recourse of justifying their discursive control by focusing on errors in spelling, grammar, and mechanics that are indubitably there and that make reading the literacy letters as difficult as reading Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, or Althusser” (139)

                                                               i.      !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                                             ii.      I took this as ---  idk how to say it.  I hated it, and loved it.  Like--- on one hand, bless you teachers for your sensitivity to your audience, way to not correct your way into condescension.  On the other, ha!!! You just put their language on the same page as some big time names, you say it jokingly? Partially seriously? Iunno, but you say it, and people like me, goo---- no but seriously, Linda, I see their work as just as …. Beautiful.  But I still want to teach code-switching! But I still love how correct syntax and grammar can make a sentence sing, correctly; sing in tune, I mean, or not it’s just like jazz and that’s not… I mean…wait…more like EDM, which is not music but appropriated and spliced together pieces of… not really a creation...wtf am I saying…anyways…  my teaching philosophy, can you spot its pieces in here?

Blending various forms, genres, mediums, modes, lowbrow to highbrow, focusing on the relationship between content and content holder in context to it(s) surroundings, its rhetorical space, is what I found my philosophy on.  I emphasize this because I see it as a way to cut through ideology(s) and discourse(s) similar to what was mentioned by Brodkey, not cutting around, not carving out, but diving in to till you drip in confusion (by confusion I mean the pieces to our lives- social, political, cultural, gendered, religious, etc. all that good stuff that makes us who are we are).  Only then can you taste the salt in the water, and then after a little while longer the minerals- an acquired taste of sorts, it must be “learned” hmmm.  Still a work in progress, but I think I’m getting closer.  

   

The structure of Trainor

Despite being a VERY tricky subject to approach within a research endeavor, I really like Trainor's piece. There were sections, most notably the students interviews, which made me cringe (heavily), but I loved the way she structured her paper.

I constantly find myself at odds with a few of my friends in the class (mainly Amanda and Michelle) who love love love the heavily theorized pieces that tend to go way over my head.  The Trainor piece was the first research article that I found myself eager to complete.  Maybe it's my literature background that made the content seem more applicable... who knows.  I think I can break it down into a couple instances of Trainor's writing that I would like to use in my own prospectus.

First, she was constantly defining her terms (for those of us not heavily versed in Rhet/Comp)
Second, she utilized the narrative structure so seamlessly.  I could hardly notice when she changed from theory to the real life examples.
Third, the reflections on her narrative and student contributions really hit home.  I think that if I was interviewed at he same age of these students my answers would have been closer to theirs than I would like to think.  I did grow up in a radically large white-populated neighborhood.  The kids at my school pretty much all had parents with graduate degrees and planned to go to school.  I would never in a million years call myself racist (I am half middle-eastern so I think it's impossible...) but I never quite realized how much the area that surrounded me influenced my way of analysis.  The sections with ethnographic analysis, therefore, were extremely interesting.

Shari - Berlin piece

Shari -  Berlin states that the New Rhetoricians is the most practical and most intelligent way to teaching writing.  He believes it serves the needs of the students best as well.  He states that "knowledge is not simply a static entity available for retrieval. Truth is dynamic dialectical, the result of a process involving the interaction of opposing elements."  So what the writer brings is important.  How he/she interprets information and then presents it make the writer very important.  I agree, and this makes sense  However, I wish Berlin would have provided examples on how to teach this theory.  It would have been more helpful if he had given this three different theories and then provided ways of they are or can be taught in the classroom.