assignments ENGL301 Writing & The Teaching of Writing: LT stuff
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 ltorda@bridgew.edu www.leetorda.com |
Fall 2015 Office Hours
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In-Class Writing on Rose:
Analysis & Critique: I won’t lie. I find Mike Rose’s story both sane and humane and, in some ways inspirational. I appreciate his full on belief that a really great teacher can make a real difference in a student’s life. I do. And I think that most of my students want to be that teacher for other students. But, I also believe this: you can’t save all your students. You can’t be McFarland period. You can’t be Carruthers all the time to all students. You’ll kill yourself if you do. And I’m not that person. I also don’t think that being a savior is entirely right for students. This is why I always talk about assignments. Because if you say to me that if you can reach out to just one student, you’ll be happy with your job, I’m going to tell you to find a different one. Because you need to try to work with all of your students. Every single slack ass one of them.
My other critique of Rose is more about something he can’t control. I believe that when he wrote this in 1986 he might have believed that what he was writing would resonate with every student (and despite this classes reaction, I often find this to be the case). But in 2015, I can not help but recognize that, despite his poverty as a child and even his generation 2.0 status, he had a great deal of privilege as a young white male in the 1950s. I know people don’t like it when you say that, but it’s still true. If he had been, say, a young black woman in the south at that same time, what would his story have been? Well, she wouldn’t have ended up at Loyola, that’s for sure. But, even today’s young students who need to over come first generation, socio-economic and color and gender barriers simply have a different landscape. It’s not become easier to overcome poverty in our country; it’s become harder. So I don’t even know if this is the story you could tell today.
Finally, one thing that he never really talks about his how his particular education is a kind of education that is, to a certain extent, not really diverse. There is certainly value in the great books education he is describing here, but, embedded in that education is a lot of exclusion and elitism. He could probably see himself in those texts, but I’m not sure that is really the case for all students. There are limits to this kind of education.
Top Five Really Big Ideas:
1. We profoundly misunderstand what “remedial” means—or what a deficit looks like. This is true about a general public. This is true about the US historically. This is true for many of us who teach in classrooms.
2. We profoundly under-understand the role poverty plays in depriving students of a good education. It is not just a poverty that means you go to a bad school. It also means that you have nothing around you that inspires a passion in you.
3. A humane liberal education, as espoused by the McFarlands of the world is less about content as it is about the process of engagement. It is authentic reading and authentic discussion that creates the file in Rose and the other students in his classroom.
4. Inspiration does not trump academic preparation. When Rose gets to Loyola, he does not have the academic skills to manage this new landscape. This is not to be confused with intelligence. And this is related to what I want to say next:
5. We have profoundly useless measurements of whether a student is a thoughtful, capable thinker (not intelligent—a totally different thing and not just a good student; you can be absolutely a dumbo and do well in school).
6. Students are not the only people at fault for their lack of success. This connects to many things that we are seeing here. Poverty of home life and educational
7. Access—who gets to go to the good school; who gets to go to the
8. Teaching is a powerful thing.
9. Educating in a democracy is hard and joyous at the same time
Sample Reading Journal (from Grammar to Enrich, etc.)
Analysis & Critique: I won’t lie. I find Mike Rose’s story both sane and humane and, in some ways inspirational. I appreciate his full on belief that a really great teacher can make a real difference in a student’s life. I do. And I think that most of my students want to be that teacher for other students. But, I also believe this: you can’t save all your students. You can’t be McFarland period. You can’t be Carruthers all the time to all students. You’ll kill yourself if you do. And I’m not that person. I also don’t think that being a savior is entirely right for students. This is why I always talk about assignments. Because if you say to me that if you can reach out to just one student, you’ll be happy with your job, I’m going to tell you to find a different one. Because you need to try to work with all of your students. Every single slack ass one of them.
My other critique of Rose is more about something he can’t control. I believe that when he wrote this in 1986 he might have believed that what he was writing would resonate with every student (and despite this classes reaction, I often find this to be the case). But in 2015, I can not help but recognize that, despite his poverty as a child and even his generation 2.0 status, he had a great deal of privilege as a young white male in the 1950s. I know people don’t like it when you say that, but it’s still true. If he had been, say, a young black woman in the south at that same time, what would his story have been? Well, she wouldn’t have ended up at Loyola, that’s for sure. But, even today’s young students who need to over come first generation, socio-economic and color and gender barriers simply have a different landscape. It’s not become easier to overcome poverty in our country; it’s become harder. So I don’t even know if this is the story you could tell today.
Finally, one thing that he never really talks about his how his particular education is a kind of education that is, to a certain extent, not really diverse. There is certainly value in the great books education he is describing here, but, embedded in that education is a lot of exclusion and elitism. He could probably see himself in those texts, but I’m not sure that is really the case for all students. There are limits to this kind of education.
Top Five Really Big Ideas:
1. We profoundly misunderstand what “remedial” means—or what a deficit looks like. This is true about a general public. This is true about the US historically. This is true for many of us who teach in classrooms.
2. We profoundly under-understand the role poverty plays in depriving students of a good education. It is not just a poverty that means you go to a bad school. It also means that you have nothing around you that inspires a passion in you.
3. A humane liberal education, as espoused by the McFarlands of the world is less about content as it is about the process of engagement. It is authentic reading and authentic discussion that creates the file in Rose and the other students in his classroom.
4. Inspiration does not trump academic preparation. When Rose gets to Loyola, he does not have the academic skills to manage this new landscape. This is not to be confused with intelligence. And this is related to what I want to say next:
5. We have profoundly useless measurements of whether a student is a thoughtful, capable thinker (not intelligent—a totally different thing and not just a good student; you can be absolutely a dumbo and do well in school).
6. Students are not the only people at fault for their lack of success. This connects to many things that we are seeing here. Poverty of home life and educational
7. Access—who gets to go to the good school; who gets to go to the
8. Teaching is a powerful thing.
9. Educating in a democracy is hard and joyous at the same time
Sample Reading Journal (from Grammar to Enrich, etc.)
| weaver_readers_notes.docx |
Sample Evaluations
| samples_for_301.2012.docx |
Writing About Gertrude Stein. . .
I have read this so many times. I’ve read it out loud to large crowds in an effort to help people see how hard it is to be a good reader. So my gut reaction to this text is less gut than it is memory. I am careful, as I read, to say the words as naturally as possible. I’m tentative and sometimes my pace is off because it’s hard to read what seem like nonsense words that seem to follow the rules of grammar. Of course they don’t. They sound like they do, but they don’t. Nouns that are not nouns are used as nouns. Verbs that are not vers are used as verbs.
And, still, all this time later, I wonder what this could possibly mean. I want, finally, to know the secret. It’s maddening not to know for sure what’s happening in this text. To not know for sure. To be guessing.
Well, I’ll start with the thing that I always notice:
Each title is a mini-statement. A one-word sentence. But it is punctuated as a statement—not an exclamation or a question. It’s a statement.
To follow up: there are only periods. They are all statements. And, further, the “to be” verb is in big play. Things either are or they are not.
The titles are all in caps. Which, I guess, is why I think they are titles.
There is alliteration.
There is repetition. With an addition.
There is assonance (alliteration with vowels).
There is a lot of color in the piece. Things are white or green or something like that.
They are all food—except, except, Sean, End of Summer.
It is mostly vegetables. But there is a cake and a custard. And there is sausage. Oh, and butter.
Fake onomatopoeia (using phontetics to make a new word out of a few other ones)
Students always imagine that I have the inside skinny on our friend Gertrude, and, true, I do know more about her, but it never helps me to figure out what this poem is about. This text. There is something about tone for me. There is a contemplative feel. There is a melancholy to it—it’s the end of summer line that gets me. The end of summer is a contemplative time. Things start to die off. It’s like late middle age. You have less to go than you have ahead of you. A woman. I imagine the speaker to be a woman. Food is the stuff of kitchens and gardens. That is the purview of women. And, with the exception of cake right in the middle of the piece, this feels like a meal in progress. Or a meal in preparation. We start with a sort of salad or crudité. We have a our fish course. Our sausage. In Italy you end the meal with salad. I’m trying to hard here. I don’t think it needs to be quite so precise.
And things are or aren’t. This is a narrator trying to decide things after a life lived perhaps. That’s when you know what you are about. That’s why these aren’t questions. These are statements. Things are this or they aren’t this. Or they are something else. This is a general and diffuse interpretation. The thing about this text is that there is so much to unpack. What if I took each stanza? I’m looking at this in the aggregate. But on the small scale—and it seems to me this is a poem about the small scale. It is about an interior of a life—the small scale would tell me more.
And then there is the nonsense. The sound quality. It seems too much to think that I can ignore it. Why write it this way if it doesn’t lend itself to the telling? So perhaps when I think this is contemplative, when I say it is nostalgic, I also mean that it is dreamy. Perhaps it is stream of conscious. This is interior and so they are making sense only to themselves. That is the only sense it needs to make. The brain works that way—about sound and about tangents.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Perhaps this is happening in real time. I look at CUSTARD. It is, as is all of the pieces, written in present tense. Making a custard is no easy work. You have to work the eggs with a hand whisk. You hand does, in fact ache. And you can over do it. That line: this makes a whole little hill. I imagine the little mound of whipped eggs and I see that image very precisely. Perhaps she is cooking.
I have read this so many times. I’ve read it out loud to large crowds in an effort to help people see how hard it is to be a good reader. So my gut reaction to this text is less gut than it is memory. I am careful, as I read, to say the words as naturally as possible. I’m tentative and sometimes my pace is off because it’s hard to read what seem like nonsense words that seem to follow the rules of grammar. Of course they don’t. They sound like they do, but they don’t. Nouns that are not nouns are used as nouns. Verbs that are not vers are used as verbs.
And, still, all this time later, I wonder what this could possibly mean. I want, finally, to know the secret. It’s maddening not to know for sure what’s happening in this text. To not know for sure. To be guessing.
Well, I’ll start with the thing that I always notice:
Each title is a mini-statement. A one-word sentence. But it is punctuated as a statement—not an exclamation or a question. It’s a statement.
To follow up: there are only periods. They are all statements. And, further, the “to be” verb is in big play. Things either are or they are not.
The titles are all in caps. Which, I guess, is why I think they are titles.
There is alliteration.
There is repetition. With an addition.
There is assonance (alliteration with vowels).
There is a lot of color in the piece. Things are white or green or something like that.
They are all food—except, except, Sean, End of Summer.
It is mostly vegetables. But there is a cake and a custard. And there is sausage. Oh, and butter.
Fake onomatopoeia (using phontetics to make a new word out of a few other ones)
Students always imagine that I have the inside skinny on our friend Gertrude, and, true, I do know more about her, but it never helps me to figure out what this poem is about. This text. There is something about tone for me. There is a contemplative feel. There is a melancholy to it—it’s the end of summer line that gets me. The end of summer is a contemplative time. Things start to die off. It’s like late middle age. You have less to go than you have ahead of you. A woman. I imagine the speaker to be a woman. Food is the stuff of kitchens and gardens. That is the purview of women. And, with the exception of cake right in the middle of the piece, this feels like a meal in progress. Or a meal in preparation. We start with a sort of salad or crudité. We have a our fish course. Our sausage. In Italy you end the meal with salad. I’m trying to hard here. I don’t think it needs to be quite so precise.
And things are or aren’t. This is a narrator trying to decide things after a life lived perhaps. That’s when you know what you are about. That’s why these aren’t questions. These are statements. Things are this or they aren’t this. Or they are something else. This is a general and diffuse interpretation. The thing about this text is that there is so much to unpack. What if I took each stanza? I’m looking at this in the aggregate. But on the small scale—and it seems to me this is a poem about the small scale. It is about an interior of a life—the small scale would tell me more.
And then there is the nonsense. The sound quality. It seems too much to think that I can ignore it. Why write it this way if it doesn’t lend itself to the telling? So perhaps when I think this is contemplative, when I say it is nostalgic, I also mean that it is dreamy. Perhaps it is stream of conscious. This is interior and so they are making sense only to themselves. That is the only sense it needs to make. The brain works that way—about sound and about tangents.
I don’t know. Maybe.
Perhaps this is happening in real time. I look at CUSTARD. It is, as is all of the pieces, written in present tense. Making a custard is no easy work. You have to work the eggs with a hand whisk. You hand does, in fact ache. And you can over do it. That line: this makes a whole little hill. I imagine the little mound of whipped eggs and I see that image very precisely. Perhaps she is cooking.
Writing About Iser/Smith
In many ways, I would say that Smith and Iser are by and large entirely in sync about what happens when we read. I think both of them would say that Interpretation is an activity that happens when a reader experiences a text—makes the decision to try to read. I would also say that they talk about experience as a way to make sense of a text—either you’ve read a lot so you are a savvy reader or you have a lot of experience in life and read that way. I think they would both say that the more experience you have as a reader/liver of life the less text you need to take in.
Here is a place, though, where I think Iser and Smith are different. Well, not different, but I would say they are placing emphasis on two different things. Iser is all about the “less text you need” part. It’s the central element of his argument. And he is using it to evaluate literature. He is not interested in teaching literature at all. He’s interested in it solely from the place of a critic. And his argument that the more gaps a text has—those places in a text where the author is not telling us exactly what to think or how to think—are the places where a reader has the most opportunity to interpret. To make meaning. This idea—indeterminacy—is a value in a text. The more indeterminate a novel or a poem is, the more valuable an experience it is.
At the intersection of this is the idea of specifications or conventions. Iser is certainly talking about this from a literary standpoint—writers and readers are aware of specifications and conventions. For Iser, the ability of an author to break from them, to surprise and frustrate the reader, is a talent.
Ultimately, in both Smith and Iser, the READER IS POWERFUL. The text and the writer play roles—important roles—in the experience of reading, but it is ultimately the reader that has the most power.
The question becomes what value does this position have in terms of teaching?
What is the value of INDETERMINACY (of GAPS, BLANKS) in Teaching
I think that our instinct is to want to lesson indeterminacy for our students. And, to some extent, I do think we want that. But I don't think the answer is easier reading. I fear that's what people aim for--easier reading. Rather I think two things. First, recalling what Smith says about how reading makes us smarter, students will get smarter if they read more and read harder texts. So, as with anything, saxophone, yoga, and cooking the more you do it the better you'll get at it. Secondly, easy texts don't work out your brain as much. So, like lifting weights, you should pick up as heavy a weight as you can as a reader.
As a teacher in a classroom, I think that this takes real work. It takes a certain amount of bravery and a certain amount of risk. Because things could go very, very wrong. But I think that it's important to assign hard reading and to help our students learn to read it themselves. I think this happens through a variety of practices (here we broke for class discussion).
What we talked about: Being frank about a text being difficult; letting students write about what they don't understand; double-entry journals or asking students to identify what places in a text make them think a certain thing; spending more time on fewer readings; talking with peers about the book generally; doing modest bits of research to help fill in some of the blanks. Above all, help students live with the struggle of the text.
In many ways, I would say that Smith and Iser are by and large entirely in sync about what happens when we read. I think both of them would say that Interpretation is an activity that happens when a reader experiences a text—makes the decision to try to read. I would also say that they talk about experience as a way to make sense of a text—either you’ve read a lot so you are a savvy reader or you have a lot of experience in life and read that way. I think they would both say that the more experience you have as a reader/liver of life the less text you need to take in.
Here is a place, though, where I think Iser and Smith are different. Well, not different, but I would say they are placing emphasis on two different things. Iser is all about the “less text you need” part. It’s the central element of his argument. And he is using it to evaluate literature. He is not interested in teaching literature at all. He’s interested in it solely from the place of a critic. And his argument that the more gaps a text has—those places in a text where the author is not telling us exactly what to think or how to think—are the places where a reader has the most opportunity to interpret. To make meaning. This idea—indeterminacy—is a value in a text. The more indeterminate a novel or a poem is, the more valuable an experience it is.
At the intersection of this is the idea of specifications or conventions. Iser is certainly talking about this from a literary standpoint—writers and readers are aware of specifications and conventions. For Iser, the ability of an author to break from them, to surprise and frustrate the reader, is a talent.
Ultimately, in both Smith and Iser, the READER IS POWERFUL. The text and the writer play roles—important roles—in the experience of reading, but it is ultimately the reader that has the most power.
The question becomes what value does this position have in terms of teaching?
What is the value of INDETERMINACY (of GAPS, BLANKS) in Teaching
I think that our instinct is to want to lesson indeterminacy for our students. And, to some extent, I do think we want that. But I don't think the answer is easier reading. I fear that's what people aim for--easier reading. Rather I think two things. First, recalling what Smith says about how reading makes us smarter, students will get smarter if they read more and read harder texts. So, as with anything, saxophone, yoga, and cooking the more you do it the better you'll get at it. Secondly, easy texts don't work out your brain as much. So, like lifting weights, you should pick up as heavy a weight as you can as a reader.
As a teacher in a classroom, I think that this takes real work. It takes a certain amount of bravery and a certain amount of risk. Because things could go very, very wrong. But I think that it's important to assign hard reading and to help our students learn to read it themselves. I think this happens through a variety of practices (here we broke for class discussion).
What we talked about: Being frank about a text being difficult; letting students write about what they don't understand; double-entry journals or asking students to identify what places in a text make them think a certain thing; spending more time on fewer readings; talking with peers about the book generally; doing modest bits of research to help fill in some of the blanks. Above all, help students live with the struggle of the text.
| evaluation.versus.assessment.docx |
17 June 2015 Writing about an old assignment
My assignment revision
So one of the assignments I tried out for the first time last semester were alumni interviews with my first year students. So I paired up students with alumni that volunteered to be interviewed.
Things I think I did right: This was just serendipitous, but I matched the students well. I don’t know how or if I can guarantee that again.
Another thing: we talked about what questions to ask to get the answers you want in different ways. I asked them to deconstruct interview articles this way (one on Muhammad Ali and one about an author’s grandfather). Then, as a class, we considered what the assignment was asking them as writers to write about, and what questions they would have to ask to get material to write about it. We came up with questions as a class.
Alumni were incredibly forthcoming and generous. Some wrote more than their student partners did.
Things I didn’t do well:
Spend more time with the answers to the questions in class. When I read them later I realized that there were some real gems in the responses that would lead to better, more nuanced theses and better organization, but students being mediocre readers, did not pick up on it. So one thing I want to do this time is spend more time in class with the actual draft material. I think I want to do partner exercises where a class partner reads the material, highlighting what is interesting to them, what the thesis would be if they wrote the paper. I think I’d have them bring in multiple copies of their notes so they could get this feedback from more than one person. I might collect the interview notes prior to drafting or do a conference with students. I want them to be better armed to write.
On the back end of the assignment, Ididn’t have the students share drafts with their interviewees. I don’t think folks minded, though a few wanted to read their interviews, but mostly I think that if I had students share their drafts with their interviews prior to turning in a draft to me. That kind of growing of audience is really high stakes. It makes the impact of the assignment so much bigger. Widening an audience beyond the teacher is a high impact practice (it has effects on retention and achievement). If possible, I’d like to bring the alums to class one day. I don’t know if this is possible. Or to have students read excerpts at the midyear symposium. But it would be worth trying to.
My assignment revision
So one of the assignments I tried out for the first time last semester were alumni interviews with my first year students. So I paired up students with alumni that volunteered to be interviewed.
Things I think I did right: This was just serendipitous, but I matched the students well. I don’t know how or if I can guarantee that again.
Another thing: we talked about what questions to ask to get the answers you want in different ways. I asked them to deconstruct interview articles this way (one on Muhammad Ali and one about an author’s grandfather). Then, as a class, we considered what the assignment was asking them as writers to write about, and what questions they would have to ask to get material to write about it. We came up with questions as a class.
Alumni were incredibly forthcoming and generous. Some wrote more than their student partners did.
Things I didn’t do well:
Spend more time with the answers to the questions in class. When I read them later I realized that there were some real gems in the responses that would lead to better, more nuanced theses and better organization, but students being mediocre readers, did not pick up on it. So one thing I want to do this time is spend more time in class with the actual draft material. I think I want to do partner exercises where a class partner reads the material, highlighting what is interesting to them, what the thesis would be if they wrote the paper. I think I’d have them bring in multiple copies of their notes so they could get this feedback from more than one person. I might collect the interview notes prior to drafting or do a conference with students. I want them to be better armed to write.
On the back end of the assignment, Ididn’t have the students share drafts with their interviewees. I don’t think folks minded, though a few wanted to read their interviews, but mostly I think that if I had students share their drafts with their interviews prior to turning in a draft to me. That kind of growing of audience is really high stakes. It makes the impact of the assignment so much bigger. Widening an audience beyond the teacher is a high impact practice (it has effects on retention and achievement). If possible, I’d like to bring the alums to class one day. I don’t know if this is possible. Or to have students read excerpts at the midyear symposium. But it would be worth trying to.