Virtual Teachers Out Perform Real Ones

An interesting report from msnbc. Makes a person wonder how long before we see the "learning machine" like in Battlefield Earth? The book, not the movie of course.

Resistance is Futile

"Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key"

I kind of hoped this article was going to be about music, not just a play on "quartet." Not to mention she uses quartet incorrectly--her composition being made up of four parts is a quartet, not quartets 1-4. Sorry, I was trying to figure out what bothered me about that so much and it just came to me. Stupid non music people. That almost makes my point before I even have to say anything.

I'm going to do my best to be brief after my explosion over the blogging article. I shouldn't have read that after a day of teaching and discussing Spenser. Bad choice on my part.

No doubt someone will misunderstand me so I will say it again--I am not against blogging in the classroom, the use of internet and other media, or the pursuing of a curriculum that does more than teach "traditional" writing. I, in fact, do not teach traditional writing. In actuality I teach something more along the lines of a philosophy class when I can and a rhetoric class when I can't.

That being said (lord how do I keep this short?) the idea that writers are right now, in this moment, writing without teachers for the first time is ludicrous. You don't need a teacher to write, never have. What the issue is, or should be, is not kids are writing and we should enable that--because of course we should enable that just as we should enable "common" reading materials or movie watching--but how do we help them gain a better grasp of language? A better grasp of language and all it implies, improved thinking process, more introspective and critical thinking abilities, dialogism, is achieved through the sequenced, recursive challenging of thought. You can get that with or without computers, with or without media.

It works best (I think) when the media used is of interest to the students; I've seen my best results when using V for Vendetta, for example. But the problem-posed, as Freire would say, is inconsequential. It doesn't matter what inquiry you set up in the classroom or where they write about it. What matters is that there is an inquiry, that there is human interaction and discourse and that they write. The rest is just working towards the best results, and that may very well include internet use.

But this computer worship I see, this "computers are so fantastic they fix all our problems" attitude being expressed is not a good way to approach things. Trust me, I've been there. Computers make bad boyfriends.

"The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued"

I am very glad Canagarajah explained at the end of her conclusion that she was unsure how to implement "code-meshing" into her own writing. This explained many of the (what I would deem) rudimentary understandings that I saw in her article. I promise, I am not this much of a hater all the time.

I could write another 1000 words on this article too--it really is frustrating to me not to interact with each text in a thorough way. I will attempt to hit the high-points and am more than willing to offer deeper explanation in conversation or writing.

I think Canagarajah misunderstands the difference between ethnic languages and social/economic languages. Much of what she calls AAVE is not specifically African-American but dependent on the location and economics of the place. Growing up in the midwest I used many of the same phrases she quotes from Smitherman. That isn't to say there isn't an AAVE (ebonics being proof of that) but I seriously question how much Canagarajah understands the finite differences and reasons for what make discourses different and why.

She fails to reference significant theorists that have already concluded much of what she discusses in her article. This irritates me not because she is wrong (though she does nearly plagiarize Bartholomae at one point) but because instead of moving forward from past scholarship she acts as if she has made new discoveries. Our goal as scholars is to do our homework so that we can assume our place within the academic discussion not restate it, right?

She, and other scholars like her should seriously consider researching music as they begin attempting to understand how to manipulate language use. I actually think that is true to some degree for everyone, but many of the principles are the same between language theory and music theory. Things are right or wrong because we say they are; western society has learned to hear a particular thing as “correct” and now it is. For that reason it is important to consider shaking things up a bit. Beethoven did it and launched us from the Classical into the Romantic age, and academic writing is out of touch and stodgy. I also agree that students need to remain in touch with their natural discourses. However, like music, you can’t just do what you want. Well you can (look at 20th century pieces in writing and music) but you won’t connect with people as is your intention. It’s a foreign language. If you want to make your point powerfully in rhetoric you must use the discourse of your audience and bend it with your own authorial voice. People react to that; they like what they know and they like what is cleverly manipulated. That’s why Smitherman’s meshing was interesting (in places) and Canagarajah’s was fake. She said it herself, she didn’t know how to do it.

And finally, how can you write an article about something you don’t understand? And she doesn’t understand. She gets it in principle, but her lack of ability to implement it shows she doesn’t really get how it works. She knows it when she sees it. You can’t talk about theory in those terms; I would call that bad scholarship.

So again, I don’t disagree with the principles here, but I do think Canagarajah is lacking the sort of insight and understanding I want from my scholars. Speaking of history, she is also missing that as well as evidenced by her restatement of past revelations as her own with no footnote or acknowledgement that someone said it before. When I began this article I asked “why do we all agree composition is screwy but keep teaching it this way?” The answer seems pretty obvious; because too many of us don’t get why something works, we just know it when we see it. You can’t teach that. And you can’t build off of it.

"Written Communication"

What can you say about this other than okay? I see that writing and technologies is the least researched (or one of the least) areas in writing research and that is interesting. I also thought the remark in the conclusion about the "narrow definitions of what constitutes valid scientific research" (471) was an interesting starting point for the art/science discussion and writings place within it. Overall this article was an interesting "connector" between the other articles.

Blogging and the Age of Impersonality

This is going to be a long one. Gird your loins and settle in. I'm about to break all the brevity rules.

I (in an attempt to get homework done early so that I could enjoy my weekend) thought I would read the blogging article tonight because it was short, looked fun, and why not? All jokes about Terminator, Tron, and I, Robot aside I'm incredibly disturbed, not by teacher's choice to use blogs or even the public vs. private issues, but by the assumption, unchallenged by anyone who replied, that computer communities are superior to real live ones. To explain I must share a bit of personal information, but I promise it is relevant.

I used to be a computer nerd. What I mean by computer nerd is in the computer lab from the time it opened until the time it closed playing Tsunami, a MUD (a telnet program that is purely text based, a precursor to Everquest and all other online roll-playing games). On this game we could chat, we could play, and we could dream. I learned many valuable skills such as how to type upwards of 80 wpm, how to process text incredibly fast, and how to reinvent myself into whomever I wanted to be. I started playing around the age of thirteen so really it was perfect timing. We, of course, played all other manner of games but Tsunami, being a text-based game, is particular to this discussion.

By the time I graduated college with my undergraduate I had learned several incredibly important lessons: life is more fun when not encapsulated on a computer screen, friends are more real when you've met them, and no amount of pretend teaches you much of anything except how much everyone wishes they were someone other than who they are. And make no mistake, when the brunt of your interaction occurs via the internet it is all pretend.

As I read this article I grew increasingly upset by the teacher's unfettered excitement at student's opportunities to interact via the Internet. The pressures of the classroom could be avoided, shy students could engage, and writing could be shared more publicly and more easily. The last part about the writing is fantastic--I agree with the idea of public and easily accessible writing; it is important to give authority to the students. But the first two issues, avoiding classroom pressure and not demanding live interaction in a serious way is ridiculous and quite possibly harmful. Also, their assumption that any writing is as good as any other writing is false. Not because we need to write college essays of particular types, but because what matters, specifically, is the thinking process. That does not occur through everyday text messages, emails, and musings. Unless you discover or are directed towards the sort of dialogic cognitive moves that it takes to truly write well, you will have a significantly harder time mastering the writing process. It isn't about introspective, personal assignments, it's about thinking about your thinking and attempting to force the students into that sort of rhetorical move. A blog might very well be the best place to do it, but not just because it's more "normal" for them or because they might like it better.

Computer relationships are not the same thing as real relationships, teacher-student, student-student, or otherwise. I say this as a former serious computer-user. With things like match.com and eharmony we live in an age when relationships are increasingly being handled online. I understand the appeal. When instant messaging you can think through what you want to say before you type it. You can avoid confrontation. You can say what you want without having to deal with someone staring at your or challenging you vocally. Computers offer a buffer that allows for the user to feel powerful and if that user has a margin of rhetorical ability they can feel like a god.

But I'm not interested in promoting that sort of behavior in my students. Perhaps you think I overreact to this article and it isn't the use of the blog that bothers me, but, specifically, the replacement of in-class writing and dialogue with the blog. That is what is prompting my reaction. I've seen computer relationships and I've seen what they have done for people and to people. I do not consider my job as a teacher to be one that encourages this sort of disconnect with humanity. Yes I strive for dialogism in myself, my classroom, and my students, but while I may accept their lack of awareness of my message I do not accept the inevitability of that lack.

With the aid of the internet students don't have to write for themselves; they write for who they imagine themselves to be. With the lack of classroom interaction there is no accountability and the image of what they imagine can reign unchallenged. I'm not in the habit of judging my students or even praying for their change, but when one of my student's says something unacceptable (like Jews are greedy, or fat people cause children in Africa to starve) I can hold them accountable for that thought process, demand they prove it through verbal debate in a way that teaches them more about discourse, writing, and their own thought processes than blogging ever can. There is a barrier when you blog. It is not nearly as public as reading a paper aloud or watching someone read it in front of you. The danger of the internet is that it is a one-way mirror. You can see everything while remaining safely at home, hidden in your booth.

I am not opposed to blogs as tools to use in conjunction with freshman writing classes and I am not unaware of the theoretical advantages blogs offer to a classroom. But blogs must be recognized as what they are, a tool, and harnessed as any other tool is to a teacher's personal teaching philosophy. The assignments still need to be recursive and sequenced. The writing still needs to be held up to some sort of a standard (not grammatical, but dialogic, meaning-making). And teachers should not hide themselves behind computers because it's easier to deal with people through a screen.

And it is easier. They aren't challenged and you, while giving them the authority to write what they will are always, ultimately, in control. It's the perfect solution to a society with all the aspects of free thought and none of the responsibility. We certainly won't be making them better people then. But I guess we can shoot for better writers.

First Week Part 2

I absolutely loved Nystrand et. al's article. It was everything I hoped and dreamed it could be, and I'm really happy I read it last. Had I read it first I'm not sure I would have made it through Bereton's introduction. The question is, of course, what was it about Nystrand that was so darn wonderful? I give this quote as proof from page 301: "A sensitive intellectual history, therefore, must examine how the thinking of important scholars has changed, not seek merely to pigeonhole their thinking." Nystrand does what Bereton fails to do so spectacularly--he offers a dialogical survey of history that illuminates not only the theories of Composition scholarship over the years, but why they arose when they did, what they meant to the field and academia, and what use it is to the reader to understand all of this. That's what I'm looking for in an analysis of history.

There are so many things to talk about in this article and I'm afraid if I try to do it here I'll take up way to much of everyone's time so I shall attempt to paraphrase. It is freakishly scary that we still use five-paragraph essays to teach writing. I believe whole-heartedly (coming from the land of Berthoff, Bakhtin, and Bartholomae) that language, and knowledge, is dialogic and teaching pedagogies should understand this, and that the distinction between literary and composition studies is false, imagined, and the highest form of academic masturbation.

Literature is language. To say that our approach to reading and writing is vastly different seems to me created by people who couldn't write, don't like to read, or just plain hate each other. I took issue with some of the programs related in Bereton's introduction because they excluded reading from the writing classroom. Everyone agrees that reading makes you a better creative writer, so why don't we agree that reading makes you a better all around writer? I could go on about this for pages. It's something I will revisit at a later date.

I myself would rather talk about movies in an intelligent, theoretical context than most anything else. However, I love discussing literature and language. But as evidenced by my Master's final project I like talking about Shakespeare and V for Vendetta. Canonical texts and comic books. Why is there a division between the two? My point is that we create academic distance between "high" art and "low" art and pass that distance on to our students. In an effort to do whatever it is scholars are supposed to do, we forget that scholars are supposed to discover knowledge--knowledge isn't stuck up. It exists everywhere, even in comic books. This academic snobbery, however, is used to judge student's writing, to devalue their discourse and place them, exactly as Freire says, in the banking model of education. The moment you acknowledge a student's immaturity of thought you devalue their discourse. I feel that is the gravest of mistakes from the most non-dialogic of teachers.

I get worked up over this stuff. I would love to rant about the false delineation between essays, narrative, analytical, evaluative, persuasive, and why breaking them up that way is non-dialogic as well, but I'm running out of room and you all have things to do. I would like to say, though, that when we as teachers are challenged with difficult theory our response (at least mine and most everyone I've discussed this with) is to say "that's not practical." However, without the theory, the why behind why something works, we are left to offer instruction like Warriner in 1950--saying that a good writer writes well is about as helpful as saying a good musician doesn't make mistakes. It neither demystifies the act of writing, nor offers any real solution as to how we should improve it. This is also, I believe, the problem with most composition text books. Chapters on audience and description don't do students any good. They don't have access to the discourse; they don't understand how language works or their own power in manipulating it. We're asking them to swim before they even know what water is.

Alright, I'm done. Really. Sorry about the wordiness

First Week Part 1

The danger in writing a response instead of sharing thoughts in class is that there's no one here to stop me. It's just me, this computer, and two barking Doberman dogs drooling outside my door waiting for the opportunity to jump on me. Theirs is the sort of love that leaves bruises.

Thus it is that I offer my first response on three of the articles. I have read "The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing," "An Answer to the Cry for More English," and "Introduction" to The Origins of Composition Studies. I lifted the substantial heft of "Where Did Composition Studies Come From" and decided I better get my thoughts on these first three shared before they were lost amid a flurry of dog barking, my roommate yelling, and my own proclivity for distraction by shiny things.

I think I would like to first comment on the nature of blogging as opposed to writing a formal response paper. It feels different somehow. A long time blogger, I have been aware of a difference in my voice in a blog versus academic writing, but usually that voice is similar in response papers as those tend to be more informal. But for some unfathomable reason, writing this for public consumption via internet offers significantly more stress than just churning something out for Dr. J's eyes only. I don't know if this would be true for students of Composition; most of them weren't alive when the original Batman came out and think The Matrix is okay "for its time". It's entirely possible then that blogging would seem natural and, perhaps, a better medium for the writing required in English 101. I'm undecided--perhaps in the last post of the semester I will revisit the idea.

The disclaimers being issued, therefore, two of these three articles, Hill's and Bereton's, made me feel like I sat through one of my father's three hour long discussions of football and computers--I didn't really care about the knowledge; I was pretty sure I didn't want as much of it as was shared, but now I've got it anyway. It isn't a discussion about the history of the field I object to; I'm actually a huge proponent of knowing where things came from and how we got to where we are today, but Hill's essay seemed redundant after Bereton's introduction and Bereton offered surface level knowledge at best.

What can be learned from the history of Composition? What mistakes have we failed to rectify? What mistakes are we currently making? The Bedford seemed to deal with these questions significantly better. In all fairness to Bereton I had the impression many topics were discussed at great length later on in the book, but I think an introduction should to more than just listing the facts. I find it a little bit ironic that a piece on the history of Composition is badly composed. Oh the grammar is all there, and he's very informative, but he gets no marks for style. It isn't that I need special effects and a John Williams' score to make my homework "entertaining" but I do want to feel like the scholar I'm reading cares about what he's writing. I'm not interested in reading twenty pages of a fact laid out and disseminated for assimilation. This is an interesting and important topic; Bereton doesn't begin a conversation with his reader he offers them a snapshot of history, but even that seems lacking.

First of all, what is "feminist rhetoric"? Yes I just read A Room of One's Own so perhaps I'm sensitive to this phrase (thinking of women and fiction) but what does feminist rhetoric have to do with Composition theory? Do women speak/write differently? Do we acquire language differently? Is there a particular method of teaching writing that applies only to women that has been ignored throughout history? It seemed from the article that just because something was by or pertaining to women it must, therefore, be feminist. I disagree. If he was meaning the rhetoric developed by the Suffragettes that has been expanded upon by feminists since then that is something different. But still, I would probably call it civil rights rhetoric, or rhetoric of equality. I'm an unapologetic feminist, but I take issue with everything having to do with women being labeled feminist as if everything about us is as different from males as our reproductive organs. Oddly enough both men and women use language to speak and write.

I found the Bedford a much more useful and informative read. The history was short but helpful, the discussion about the 70's to the present was incredibly useful in spurring on my thoughts about my own personal pedagogy, and they loved on Bakthin. I'll admit it, I am a shameless Bakhtinian, but I honestly do feel his theories are indispensable to the teaching of Comp. The Bedford offered an unbiased look at history and some incredibly helpful critiques of the present. Instead of just telling me what we've done wrong it offered reasons and explanations. Perhaps I feel this way because the Bedford discussed the past in relationship to the future, something I always regard as important.

Doubtless the issue here is that Bereton's introduction was aimed at much different goals than the Bedford and what I, as a reader, am demanding is unfair. I acknowledge that and maybe, with further thought and consideration, I will change my mind. But for right now, I'm gonna do it anyway.