Over the last two or so decades, research in composition and rhetoric has challenged a number of traditional, “common sense” ideas about writing pedagogy. The emphasis on process over product is one example. Another, quite familiar one is the shift away from the tired old structure of the academic expository essay with its requisite introduction (which contains the thesis statement), body and conclusion. The thinking here is that this form with its three rigidly defined constituent parts is 1) not necessarily conducive to original, critical thinking and is therefore counterproductive to effective arguing, and 2) scarcely found anywhere else other than introductory writing courses.

Some folks find this idea to be radical and exciting enough to claim a bit of what Michel Foucault termed the “speakers’ benefit” in advocating that we move away from the traditional intro, body, conclusion structure. If, for example, we approach the traditional essay structure in terms of how it adversely affects students’ ability to treat their subjects critically and keeps them locked into old, tired ways of thinking, then we can conceive of ourselves as writing pedagogy iconoclasts, liberating our students’ thought from the shackles of outdated, rigid and repressive structures.

Well, we’re not that radical or iconoclastic: To wit, Robert W. Neal, writing in 1912 in The English Journal:

The Deadly Grip of Tradition

Perhaps our pupils are still taught a fixed form for compositions — introduction, body, and conclusion-because, unsuspecting old Aristotle tried to illustrate what he had in mind about dramatic composition by employing the terms that we translate “beginning,” “middle,” and “end.” Or perhaps this mechanical makeshift for analysis is still given them because formal rhetoric in modern guise came to us largely from clerical teachers, used to the cut-and-dry methods of sermon composition as practiced almost universally until outside influences reacted on the pulpit and forced a more vital presentation of thought.

In either case, we have textbooks in use and teachers in service in which and by whom pupils are taught with fatal insistence that a composition- which should mean any piece of writing intended to serve a worth-while purpose-consists of “an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.”
For ease of teaching I wish it were true. But it is not. It falls so far short of being the truth that it often is an indefensible untruth. Modern writing outside of academic walls has largely dropped the introduction. It has dropped the introduction because it does not need it. For the same reason, it has largely dropped the conclusion.

Our generation is a generation of skilled writers. But it is not a generation addicted to introductions and conclusions. The teacher who hammers away on the introduction-body-conclusion method shows that he is not familiar with the writings of his own day, or else that he is not capable of learning new things. He is like the farmers, who, in this era of scientific cultivation, farm as grandpap farmed. Some of grandpap’s methods have not been improved upon yet, and some of them ruined the soil they were used on.

A study of the effective writing of our own day will show how largely the introduction-conclusion plan of structure has passed away. From news report to editorial article, from descriptive or expository article to argument, from short story to essay, modern writing-which is probably the most effective the world has known-shuns the formalities of structure except, when it needs them. And when it needs them, they are no longer formal divisions, but essential parts of the thought itself.
When it needs them: for like every other element of successful writing, they exist to serve an extremely definite purpose, and for nothing else. Often indeed they have no function in a particular piece of writing, and therefore, so far as that piece of writing is concerned, no excuse for being. Especially is this so of the introduction; and the conclusion more often than not is already present merely in the logical close of the article itself.

My protest therefore is not directed against introductions and conclusions in themselves, but to the teaching that makes them appear as necessary parts of every piece of writing. Every editor knows that he can waste-basket from one sheet to three sheets at the beginning of the “stuff” the tyro turns in, and lose nothing. Every instructor of college Freshmen knows the paper that consists of a long introduction and little else-the necessary number of words having been written, with a line or two of “body” and a formal “conclusion” tacked on. No small part of Freshman teaching consists in demonstrating to the students that they have not in the least outlined a paper when they have set down “Introduction-Body-Conclusion.” Thought is not to be analyzed in any such mechanical way, and we do pupils a wrong in making them think that it can be.

I’d put a conclusion here, but, well, you know . . .

I’m currently teaching an English course whose main learning objective is to improve written and oral communication skills of international students.  Basically this translates into ESL instruction.  In fact, the school puts tremendous emphasis on ‘correctness.’ I try to incorporate a grammar component into almost every written and oral assignment.  At this point, despite the fact that we have spent the first 4 weeks on most fundamental topics – subject verb agreement, run-ons, fragments, and sentence structure – my students are making egregious numbers of mistakes in their papers.  I certainly understand that they’re grappling with lots of new issues on both compositional and grammatical levels, and, as the semester progresses, they’ll gradually become better equipped to discern their errors.  But I wonder what can I do as an instructor to help them get to this place sooner?

So far, I have tried to vary our contexts for discussing grammar.  I select sentences from their papers and we correct them as a big group; sometimes they do the same in small groups. The traditional technique of giving a lecture/presentation followed by in-class exercises is another method I tried, especially because I know that many of these students are used to this type of instruction.  So, I try to make it easier for them to process new information in this familiar way. I have also assigned an error log, and of course they’re responding to each other’s writing, paying particular attention to grammar and usage.

I still wonder if there are other effective ways to teach grammar.  Suggestions would be much appreciated.

In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story.   Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

Reading David’s posting on online reading and watching the McLuhan interview clip led me to ask myself a series of questions. What will our future students in classroom be like? Will they be significantly different from what we have now? What comes next after the X, Y, and Z generations? If the average attention span of “TV audience” is 4-5 minutes, what is the number for the Internet generation?

In light of the media’s role in the ongoing generational shift, I found N. Katherine Hayles’s article “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes” in the 2007 Profession very interesting. According to her essay, so-called “Generation M” (M stands for media, I assume), an age group ranging from 8 to 18 years old, spends average 6.5 hours everyday consuming media that are divided into 3.51 hours’ watching TV and DVD movies, 1.44 hrs’ listening MP3, music CDs, and radio, 1.02 hrs of Web surfing, 0.49 hrs’ playing video games, and 0.43 hrs of reading. I don’t think the statistics stands for the whole young generation, but it can still be something to be concerned about. What Hayles has observed in this research is that we are moving away from a generation of “deep attention”, the ability to concentrate on a single subject for long periods, toward a generation of “hyper attention”, the tendency to prefer multitasking and high levels of stimulation.

Yet, this simple distinction between deep and hyper attention is not what I found the most interesting. What is more intriguing is that the activities that Generation M are involved in using new media tools, for example, playing computer games, in fact, require a combination of deep and hyper attention skills. Hayles juxtaposes the experience of reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with playing the popular computer game Riven in the sense that both activities oblige students to have the ability to develop deep and hyper attention: for instance, sorting out useful information or remembering key clues in order to solve the multiple puzzles embedded in each text. She also offers a few suggestions about how to bring the digital media technologies into classroom, for example, reading difficult books alongside with online interactive stories that students are familiar with.

Hayles’s article makes me think about many possible ways that we as educators cope with challenges in today’s classroom, but there is one thing that troubles me. After all, it is quite expensive to have students and classrooms equipped with TV sets, computers and laptops, overhead projectors, and other media gadgets. So, unfortunately, the argument of incorporating technologies into classroom can go as far as the developed nations are concerned.

I’d like to call your attention to a new blog we’re supporting here at Baruch College: The Baruch College Teaching Blog.

Several faculty have agreed to post to the blog regularly, and to lead an ongoing conversation about teaching at Baruch College.  Surprisingly, there are very few blogs like this, which provide the opportunity for members of a college community to discuss pedagogy outside of their disciplines.  This is a unique and exciting development for the college and for CUNY, and I look forward to much interchange between the folks who post to and follow that blog and Cacophonites.

It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material—whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance—and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.

As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many a “good” teacher is not necessarily helping their students to be good learners, and often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in classes like literature where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and others less frequently express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1-2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not writing intensive.

This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes—after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school—I cannot help but think that if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college work, and what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?

But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that we do here at the institute, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills, the hallmarks of a good education? Shouldn’t every class be writing and communication intensive?

Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, or whatever, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think write and communicate, and to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm, is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them after all, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement only twice during their college career, only underlines the idea that the classes that emphasize these skills are just another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”

I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all too often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.

It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn.

I just read an interesting article by Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle about how students’ approaches to reading and interacting with information online seem to be hindering their ability to read and learn from texts in more traditional settings.  Specifically, he contends that:

The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions as educators are increasingly trying to incorporate some of these technologies into the classroom and publishers are pushing textbook content into more profitable eBooks.  Are we actually helping students by doing all of this?  Some initial studies of middle and high school students suggest that technology-intensive curricula do not improve student achievement.

Bauerlein has many interesting points in the article and makes a good case for “unplugging” some aspects of teaching and learning.  However, in my opinion, the question of whether or not technology in general improves/impairs student learning is not that interesting.  Instead, we should be focusing our assessments on understanding which technologies can be usefully employed in which aspects of the curricula.  Finding pedagogical fit for relevant technologies seems to be what we are striving towards at BLSCI.  Thus, as an institute, we undoubtedly have much to contribute to this important discussion.

ShareThis

I have not read David Gilmour’s The Film Club: A Memoir reviewed a few months ago in the New York Times. It’s about a man who decides to home school his teenage son through a diet of film, film, film. Three a week. And nothing else. I was curious if anyone perusing this blog has read it, and if so, if they have any thoughts about it concerning alternative schooling and pedagogy.

ShareThis

While imbibing Lorna Hutson’s introduction to Ben Jonson’s collected plays, I was intrigued by this passage about the thematic and stylistic differences between Shakespeare and Jonson:

“In fact, Jonson has a complex sense of human psychology, but his interest as a dramatist lies more in the psychology of habitual behavior than behavior in the transitional moments of life crisis for which Shakespeare’s plays are often metaphors. He is also interested in the way that human desires, anxieties and creative energies are affected by the material conditions of their communication.”

Jonson’s interest in these material conditions birthed some good stuff, like Epicoene, a play in which the character “Morose” develops a nervous reaction to the noise and congestion of London; he double-lines his walls, insulates his windows, seeks a silent wife, and even plans a silent wedding. While reading Morose’s comic antics, I was reminded of a recent posting on the blog Burnt Out Adjunct, who writes about the ‘Research = Google’ phenomenon that’s pitting frustrated professors against usually-clueless students in universities across the country. (World?) Maybe it’s all in a name, but suddenly, the familiar plight of poor Burnt Out seemed to strangely echo the desperate shutting-out attempts of Morose.

“Contemporary students come to college with a different set of expectations than they did even ten years ago,” Burnt Out notes. “These students are not agog at the level and breadth of information available to them. Rather, they expect to be able to, within a few key strokes, to gain access to whatever information they seek.” Cut to cranky professors trying to hold their research high ground, sputtering “but…but…” while the well-meaning libraries scramble to catalog information in new and easier and more searchable ways that do everything but deliver e-journals to students with a side of fries and a coke.

Perhaps for many of us though—especially those of us still in the slow drip of a doctoral program—both sides of the battlefield make sense. Sure, we grew up with Atari and eventually graduated to SuperNintendo, but many of us went to school before there was a computer in every classroom, and attended undergrad right around the time that card catalogs were transforming into still-lifes in the hallowed halls of our libraries. We know what Burnt Out knows—that “the Net does not cast the skein that one might assume.” And so while I’ve plenty of times found myself “just checking” the exact date of which Dumas was which on Wikipedia, I’m still made uncomfortable by a student relying on it as one of their sources for a speech or paper. (And it’s very easy to somehow dump on Wikipedia first; wisegeek.com and answers.com seem to be just as popular these days, and there are of course plenty others.) If only it were as simple as the use of pure plagiarism sites like dreamessays.com, but those kinds of offenses are the most easily detected and argued against.

Earning his moniker, Burnt Out ends his posting on a negative note: “So, committees will form, grants will be given and studies will recommend that individual professors seek to imbue a research skill-set into their objectives. And without a standard (either a collective standard (MLA) or an organizational approach (ie Google)), the Natives and the Profs will continue to lament just how odd, lazy, out-of-touch, etc. the other is.” I’m not ready to feel quite so despairing—perhaps because I think that imbuing a research skill-set can go a long way, depending on its implementation— but also because I’m somewhat wary that a collective standard issued by MLA will really connect to the heart of the problem (especially given the reality of the student population found at so many large universities, which seems to prohibit a one-size-fits-all approach from the get-go). And also because I wonder what the point of frowning in the face of the coming tide will really accomplish.

It raises an interesting question, to be sure: what part of the problem is just plain ol’ insistence on things being as we were taught? And how can we embrace the challenge of defending why an article on Walt Disney from the Journal of Popular Culture is preferred (and required) over one from Wikipedia? How do we rise to the task of communicating these reasons to our students in innovative and effective ways, rather than just putting a big “X” through wisegeek.com in their Bibliography? After all, as much as Morose tries escaping the noise, he’s the one who ends up looking like an absurd old man and unsympathetic spoiler—easily polarizing characterizations that risk getting in the way of communication most of all.

ShareThis

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.

In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.

The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.

(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.

ShareThis