unmanlyfesto for teaching writing next time, part 2

• Make it a practicum. Write and workshop in class more often.
• Work on several different “types” of writing simultaneously.
• Make students write short things more often.
• Have more one-on-one conferences with me.
• Make workshops/peer reviews shorter and involve less commitment.
• Call it a “creative thinking” course, but say that you can’t create just by thinking. You have to do something, and what you’ll do in this class is create writing. You’ll create creative thoughts by making texts (i.e. writing). There are plenty of other ways to make creative thoughts and in an important sense, writing is old fashioned. But people still think it’s so important, so we’re going to stick with it for now. Say: “Thinking is worthless without writing.”
• Read Wayne Booth’s “The Rheotircal Situation” on days one and two. Have students read it aloud in class and talk through confusing things and have them read it at home in between the first two classes so they can really engage it. Splice this reading in with brief intros and getting-to-know-you type stuff. This will be a struggle we can all endure together, in order to form a community… like the people in that movie Alive.
• Begin the semester with a simple, easily accessible and easily get-mad-about-able essay that makes a serious (that is, not ironic/too tongue-in-cheek) argument about a non-serious issue (that is, not directly political or with obviously grave consequences), e.g. Amy Gross’s article offering dating advice. Have students summarize and rebut this argument. Then have students read these two arguments (the original essay and one classmate’s rebuttal) “across” each other, compare-contrasting them to gain some insight into one or both. Also have them write a more “free” response to their classmate’s paper, giving it a “critique” from their own perspective. Part of the point of this is to, with any luck, show them that a critique based on the framework of another text is more easily kept controlled, balanced, organized, and coherent than a critique based on their own vague, unarticulated position. The latter type of critique also, oddly or not, tends to seem like a critique “in general” or from an “objective” perspective….
• Not focus on what my students do wrong… I mean wrong. I sometimes tend to focus on things that I can easily say are just wrong because these things are easier to deal with.
• More emphatically emphasize that the point of critique is to say something non-obvious, “come to a deeper understanding,” as Behrens and Rosen say, about a text. Add that the non-obvious thing is a construction. It’s something they, as authors, invent.
• Emphasize that I’m not going to chase them down about stuff. I don’t want to have to worry excessively about who handed in what….

unmanlyfesto for teaching in the future, part 1

The next time I teach freshman writing, I will:

• Use the Learning Record;
• Add a description of “independence” to the description of the dimension of learning called “confidence and independence”;
• Grade individual assignments on A-F scale but clearly indicate to the students that I will NOT tally these grades to determine their final grades. Instead, the student will still present an argument for their grade based on the framework provided by the Learning Record, and they will receive a grade from me based on their LR. This way, I can be as honest, clear, and direct as possible about the quality of students’ work (because I will tell them in the familiar language of letter grades) but can still insist that very high quality doesn’t guarantee an A and below-average, barely acceptable work doesn’t guarantee a D.
• I will have questions to respond to for each assignment students complete, like the questions I used to respond to the LR.
• When students write multiple drafts of an essay, one of the questions I will respond to will have to do with the way the students responded to my comments on their earlier draft(s). I might even give a separate grade to indicate the quality of revision. The goal here is to evaluate the (evidence of) effort and thought that went into revision separately from the quality of the essay.

writing teaching history my

One thing I am doing right now is teaching freshman writing. One thing I am becoming more and more convinced of is that writing teachers need to concentrate on teaching writing. That sounds like a joke. It’s not.

I should say that I’m mostly thinking of “basic” writing, beginner courses.

Writing teachers often teach classes “on X” in which students do a lot of writing… about X. Even if the course is not explicitly “about X,” the teacher is forced by circumstances to come up with some X to make students practice reading and writing about. Last year, I taught a course that wasn’t explicitly focused on a particular X. But I was given a book to teach, a long book. The book was mainly about intellectual property law. And I brought in other, related readings, to support that book, so that the book didn’t just float through class out of context. Before I knew it, my course was largely (not completely but maybe primarily) about intellectual property law. This is what happens. The writing course becomes about what the writing is about.

All the energy a writing teacher puts into planning a class that deals with any “content”–other than the content that is writing–is energy directed away from the assumed goal of the course: teaching people how to write. Now, this is a rough patch I’ve entered because “how to write” without an object, without a specified type of text to be written, is a phrase some? all? many? most? writing teachers (the ones I like?) will probably avoid. It’s dangerous territory. It might seem like I’m implying that there could be a course in “general(ized) writing,” a writing course without content. I’m not. Not really.

The small liberal arts college I’m teaching at pairs all of its (mostly adjunct-taught) freshman writing classes with a year-long, thematically-focused, interdisciplinary course that is team-taught by two real professors. The writing instructor (or professor, in a few cases) has the option to line up his/er curriculum with the other course’s curriculum.

(P.S. This arrangement happens at a lot, or at least several, other colleges and universities. I tend to think of the required interdisciplinary course as the super-group or maybe the concept album or maybe the prog rock of the undergraduate humanities curriculum. It always sounds really ambitious and exciting and appears to have really figured out something important, but it often gets too big for its britches and turns out kinda corny.)

But the one I’m working with seems to be working quite well. I decided to connect my class to the other one as much as possible. I made this decision in part because I am bad at making decisions and this one felt like it would eliminate several other decisions. But I also made this decision because writing, rhetoric-as-writing, only works… sorry, works best when it’s plugged in somewhere.

This is one of the difficulties of writing-and-rhetoric’s interdisciplinary nature. It’s not interdisciplinary in the way that environmental science and robotics are interdisciplinary. Those two subjects are newly developed fields that have to draw on and combine the tools and insights of a variety of previously established disciplines to address historically unprecedented situations, questions, and problems. Rhetoric and/or rhetoric-as-writing is/are different. It/they is/are paradisciplinary. Writing-and-rhetoric, like any of the good old-fashioned humanities, addresses questions that have been around for a long time. It addresses questions that come up in a variety of contexts and situations. It is a parasite, but an essential parasite, and should be approached–that is, taught–as such. It only exists with something else that is not writing/rhetoric. It needs a site, a host. And no host-site will ever be sufficient. Every one will only bring writing partially into view/existence.

This is not, of course, to say that we shouldn’t have writing teachers and rhetoric teachers. Just because its a para-thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t warrant being approached–that is studied–”on it own.” It is, of course, only ever hypothetically or potentially “on its own.” And this is why, to double back, it should only be taught–taught to beginners, since they’re the only ones who need to be taught–with something. It can be studied “on its own,” but this is harder, and usually too hard for beginners. Experts in writing-and-rhetoric study in order to better teach their paradiscipline. They aren’t the only ones who teach it, though. Those regular disciplinary people also teach it. But they always teach it with whatever else they are teaching and, since they are experts in the whatever else, they foreground that.

Someone needs to step in and step on the content once in a while and talk about writing that content. The discipline person can do it and they might do a fine job. But writing is not just what goes and comes with that content. The writing person has studied the para-, writing “on its own.” This helps.

[P.S. = parascript]