this is the virtual writing space for english 61094, teaching college writing. here, we'll share our writing & thinking as readers of the scholarly material for the course, as thinkers engaging in theories of teaching & learning, as future writing teachers planning out how we'll design our courses & relate to our students, as students reflecting on our own experiences as learners & writers, and as writers engaged in 21st century writing practices. this may be the first time you've written online. all the better. writing teachers should have experience in how people are writing now and in the spaces writers frequent. this blog is open - so when you write, you're writing for yourself, for your class colleagues, and for people "out there" who might be reading over your shoulder virtually.
we'll use this space to reflect on the course - what we're reading, what we're talking about, what we're doing in class meetings and class assignments. participation is required - although i'm hoping that as you immerse yourself in each other's thoughts & words, you'll find this an exciting & stimulating aspect of the course. consistently, across course levels, i have found that reading student responses (in a variety of forms - in notebooks, on computer printouts, in listservs, on electronic bulletin boards, in blogs) have been my favorite part of teaching. i learn so much from the collective intellligence of the courses i've been fortunate to be part of. your participation here should be a balance of two equal types: responses to the course material and responses to one another. responses to the course material should summarize the argument and analyze that argument from your own perspective. it's perfectly appropriate in these to actually quote the scholar. responses to your class colleagues might pick up their summary of the argument or their analysis. you can argue or develop further either line of argument.
but whatever you write, do it thoughtfully, with care, and grounded in the course.
you should post about 1000 words a week (this entry is 429 words in length). this can be a combination of your responses to the course material and responses to one another. balance these so that in the end of the course, you’ve done both.
i’d like to keep this blog as a central location for the class musings, so we don’t all have to trek out to different locations. you’re also welcome to start your own blog by going to blogspot.com, though, and your individual blog can be linked to this class blog. the directions are pretty straightforward.
let’s write!
pam
7 comments:
Hey there,
Since there's no post about Thursday's articles, I'm just going to post about them in response to this post.
Hillocks: I agree with the fact that it’s not necessarily a lack of knowledge that could be keeping students from producing good work; it could be a lack of interest holding these students back. Of course, since Hillocks’ article examines high school students, you could say that pre-college teachers are required – at least on some level – to have their students learn the material that they teach. On the college level, most professors take the stance of “We’re all adults here” and only seem to engage the students who really want to learn (which, of course, is not always a bad thing).
So, the question is, how obligated should we feel to keep our students interested? I feel that teaching should be a two-way street (Is this a cliché? I’m not sure.). Some students are going to be extremely difficult, and some are just going through the motions in college – I know a lot of my peers were when I was an undergrad. But I think teachers should take the extra effort to break away from rigid structure and try to “read” the class to find out what topics can spark interest in the students. This, in turn, will make things much easier for the teacher.
When I was taking my Freshman English course as an undergrad, the terrorist attacks of September 11th took place. You’d better believe that we had some good topics/essays/papers that semester, all sparked by interest, debate, and discussion in class.
As a tutor, I tried to spark this same interest in the students I met with. Most just didn’t know how versatile a tool writing can be, and that the possibility exists that they can take something of personal interest and write about it in the form of an argumentative or informative paper.
Shuy:
The coordinator of the Writing Center I worked at taught me that the “below the water” elements of writing (presented in Shuy’s article) are the most important ones; this made a lot of sense to me. Even though I am passionate about the surface level of grammar (as we all should be, though maybe not in a strict grammar school teacher sense), I still feel that there is too much emphasis on things that are “above the water” in English classes. I assume that most of us were taught the parts of language for most of our lives, but never got the chance to do anything with these parts until high school – and it’s debatable if going over the parts so often and for so long actually helped us later in life. Sure, we can identify parts of speech, but how is that going to turn around a crummy paper?
The holistic approach solves most of these problems. It’s anecdotal evidence, but I credit my writing abilities and the amount of pages I write each week as a freelancer (too many) with the fact that as a child and young adult, I took it upon myself to become immersed in language; I was always reading, always writing, and never really thinking about the parts. Only later in life – much, much later – did I come to have an appreciation for the many parts of language. All along I was following the idea of purpose over form, a rule that would also work well in an English class.
Of course, I’m not saying that form should be ignored completely. But I think form is getting less and less important as grammar-checking programs grow more powerful. They’re already starting to recognize errors in context, which is what they were meant to do all along.
I agree with Bob and Hillocks in that a lack of interest in what they are doing often keeps students from producing their best works. I think that teachers can help to ease that boredom by doing as Hillocks suggests and having a flexible enough curriculum to allow for tailoring of the class to students' specific needs. No two classes are exactly alike, so you can't expect to teach the same course for twenty years, as some teachers do. In order to prevent boredom in the class room, you can also put all of your lessons in context, as Shuy is a fan of. I think it is important to give students a "why." No project or assignment should be assigned without explaining to the student wht will be gained from completing it. Having clear goals helps students to situate themselves in a classroom.
Teaching is a two-way street, but I think a main goal of teaching should be keeping the students interested. Teaching doesn't have much impact if students are bored into a coma. If they aren't engaged in the classroom, they won't be engaged outside of the classroom, so they will not practice any of the skills they are learning. Thinking back, the classes I was most bored with, I remember very little of. On the contrary, the classes in which I was encouraged to think, and talk, and quetsion in, are the ones I remember most. It is the information garnered from those that I have taken with me.
The big ideas I got from Shuy were context and sequence. Grammar, however dull or systematic, is critical to effective writing. Putting the multitude of grammar rules in the context of the paper gives the students (writers) a concrete reason to learn the rules, as opposed to merely memorizing them to pass Friday's quiz.
This is where the sequence point comes in. Shuy noted that a teacher should not abandon teaching form over function, merely that the comprehension of form is clearer once the function in understood. Teach function, then focuson formal problems as they arrise.
I think it's intersting that Bob mentioned grammar check programs (well, grammar check within programs). Would it be effective to use Word to teach grammar (as in, just allowing it to correct mistakes)? Or do you guys think that no matter how advanced, it's still a computer program and cannot replace the fluidity of a teachers mind? I have no idea, just thought I'd throw that out.
I would like to start out by agreeing with Ashley about boredom in the classroom. I never appreciated any class in which i was bored to tears, and i find that it is a common affliction in most english classrooms. I think that the teacher/professor has control over the situation by watching their students and reacting in a positive way. Instead of becoming angry because a student has stared out the window for an entire class, perhaps the teacher should ask themselves "why?". Teaching should be a dynamic process and the more the students recognize the teacher's willingness to adapt for them , then the more likely the students will work for the teacher. I see no reason why a teacher would continue to teach in a way that does not work. I think it was the Hillocks article that said teachers blame the students, but how many years of "bad" students would a teacher have to watch before they realized that maybe, just maybe, the fault was not the students'?
Brandon posed the question about grammar checking on computers, and i think that this is a legitimate question because technology is found everywhere (inside and definetly outside of classrooms). I think that the use of grammar checks are great because i believe more in the form of a piece then the function (at least in the beginning stages). I believe it is more important that a student can decide what to write, and go about presenting their ideas in a coherent manner rather than concentrating on how to memorize all semicolon rules. I think that grammar is important in later levels, in order to increase clarity, but i think the use of a computerized grammar checkers would take a lot of stress and hatred out of the classroom for the students because the students could concentrate more on the "big picture" instead of the smaller details.
In reponse to the question of whether or not to rely on grammar check to teach grammar, I'm getting more and more opposed to the idea. I've been working with Microsoft Word lately with this in mind, and have come to realize that in order for the program to be effective creatively (academiacall, scholarly...) the writer needs to have a good handle on the technical aspects of style, otherwise the program gets in the way.
I've encountered many, many frustrations with the program, and I like to think that I do have a good handle on mechanics. Most of the time it simply gets in the way. I was thinking that someone without a working knowledge would find it even more frustrating, thus making them want to write even less.
I suppose Brandon makes a good point about grammar checks, because now that i think about it i realize that i am counting on the technology to be correct. If there was a problem then i probably would not notice it unless i was doing an invasive revision. So, i guess i am on the fence about virtual grammar checks. I still think that they have merit, especially in the beginning of writing careers because it allows the writer to chill out just a bit about the small things, but later when it becomes important to write academic papers i guess the grammar checkers can really let you down.
On a completely differnt line of thought, i think i was supposed to create a scenario that showed form over function. The first scenario that popped into my head was the basic writing process of; assignment, brain storming, outline, first draft, revision, peer response, revision, and final draft. This allows the student to first visualize the assignment by only looking at what needs to be done. The student may then begin working on how to narrow their papers, include examples, ect. without worrying about correct grammar usage. Once the student moves down the trail towards the final draft then the function may be visited and the student may be given mini-lessons on particular grammars that they may have used incorrectly. The opposite of this scenario is asking a freshman to write a paper and turn it in on the first try. This makes the student focus on everything at once, and i bet most of the students would not focus on how well they answerd the question or how well their ideas are defined, instead they would focus on their grammar. This places function before form, and leaves a jumbled mess of a paper for the professor to check.
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