52 posts tagged “teaching/studenting”

Ah, Thursdays...

Accomplished:

1. Taught the last 'real' session of the professional writing class that's been driving me nuts. The really awful kid didn't show up, which was just lovely, and things went generally well. All we have left is presentations next week. :)
2. My first-year writing course at The Community College also went very well.
3. Graded one full batch of Final Portfolios--all stunning, for the most part. Got lots of nice comments back from students about the class being awesome, about me being a good teacher. Super cool.
4. Final grades posted for that section--2 C-'s, a handful of Bs, and the rest, all well-deserved As. :) :) :)
5. Updated records for the rest of my classes.
6. Spent a lovely evening with the in-laws, who are down for SLP's graduation from college this weekend!!

Well, my deep-fried twinkie TV didn't help as much as I'd like. grrrrr...

I'm just locked in a mental wrestling match with the people in my professional writing class. They're simply maddenning. You could, and I almost have, tapdance naked with flowers growing out of your ass, and these people would simply sit there and look at you, expressionless. Today was just ridiculous---it makes me so steamed, I'm not even going to dip a toe into describing it here. Otherwise, I think this post could easily turn into a rabbit-hole of bitching. But it was. Ridiculous. Rimotherfuckingdiculous.

Makes me nuts---they don't ask questions, they won't ask questions, they barely answer them, they almost never laugh. I'm going a little extreme in my description out of emotionality---we have had some good days. But, still. Cripes. It's like being stuck waiting tables in the non-smoking section on a real drag of a night for an entire semester.

And it burns me up no end that I know that the main thing I'm tied up in is struggling hard with feeling like I haven't done as good a job as I could have as a teacher. I hate, hate, hate letting students down; hate it. And I haven't done so here, which makes me extra NUTS. I definitely haven't done the best job of teaching this course, at all, but it's my first time out with it. I have worked hard at planning and assignment design, assessment and feedback, and developing classroom community and practices for doing the work. I have actually brought a pretty genuinely welcoming heart to every fucking class section, even though I've been pretty pissed off at other times. Given all the variables, I'd give myself a B-/B for the term for this one.

A B-/B is an absolutely fine grade for a first-time class, for God's sake. And yet, I am just all snared up in evil because they just aren't stepping up to their end of the relationship. Which makes nothing but sense, because if I have ever had a serious problem with my relationshipping, it's been with taking too much responsibility for other people not stepping up to their end of a relationship.

I mean the answer to my problem is to just stop being so sure I know anything about what these people are thinking or feeling. They do not talk to me, for God's sake; how could I possibly have any idea??? If I accept that I don't know what's going on behind their expressions (or lack thereof), then I have to stop being so ego-driven and taking it all so fucking personally. I have to accept that their discomfort or whatever could be about a zillion other things that are not me. As the old saying goes, the world does not revolve around me.

Ok, I write that, and I start to feel a little ease, a little spaciousness opening up.

And it's not that dramatic, either, is it? No. In my experience, really genuinely dramatic stuff doesn't happen in my life. A person's life rarely depends on the outcome of my actions---nothing in my world is that big a deal. Right. I remember this. I know this often, lately. I'm a fan of knowing this.

And yet more spaciousness opens up. And I realize that out of a class of 12, I only have 3 people who are actually actively resistant/aggressive. I have 1 that's really just lovely and brave, 5 that are good, hardworking, sweet people who are just very, very shy, 1 that is sooooo dear, in the few moments that he connects and lights up, and 2 who kind of just hang out. Also, all of them, even the really obnoxious little shit, have grown as writers this term, at least in some measure, and some, really, quite a bit.

And we only meet 3 more times. And 2 of those are presentation days. And then it's over, and I get to go on and do a better job next time.

And now I really start to feel better. Nicer. Less like a total asshole teacher. Which is nice.

I'm just going to go in on Thursday, bring them what they need to do, and be as nice to them as I can. I won't try to save the class, or them, or anything. I'll just show up and do my part and have as light a touch as possible. I'm just gonna get out of the way...

Deep Fried Twinkie Day couldn't have come at a better time this week. My students in my professional writing class were more difficult to love than they have been alllllllllll term, which is saying a lot. I almost made my Deep-Fried Twinkie experience allowing myself to hate them for a couple hours, but I've decided against it. Down that path lies a nastily slippery slope, after all, and the semester ain't over yet.

Instead, I'm going to waste some time watching wonderful internet TV, and when I am in a good enough mood again, I shall go back and grade.

Happy Deep Fried Twinkie Day to all!

I have a lot of observant Christian students this semester. My population is almost always majority Christian, anyway. Maybe I don't have any more than I usually do, but I guess at least more of them are writing about this aspect of their subculture-memberships and identity.

They're all really pretty dolly kids, these ones. One of my girls is so very, very, very enthusiastic about her Lord that she wrote almost 3 pages of her essay about how awesome it is for her to have a relationship with him. It's very moving to read such passion for love, kindness, forgiveness, and helping others. The essay itself has a lot of problems--serious repetition, really weird use of surface conventions (grammar, spelling, etc.), and super kaleidescope organization. It really does make for kind of dizzying reading.

But who gives a fuck about any of that? Jesum Crow, not me, lemme tell you. This kid can write--she's got everything she needs, rich language use, logical use of examples that demonstrate audience awareness, a remarkable work ethic. More than anything, she's got a genuine engagement with the world and an actual, real-live appetite for learning and growing. On top of that, she really does care about people and wants to communicate with them to be helpful. What more could you ask for? By the time she leaves my class, she'll be able to hang in the sophmore academic writing game, easy.

And they're very dear, very sweet to one another, these girls. And even to odd, Jewish old me, which is nice. I swear a lot when I teach. When I was starting out, I was spoken to very strongly about this by my boss, about just how bad it could go. She told us a story about a GA from a few years back who lost his gig when a very devout Christian student, who was offended by his language use, took her mother and went straight to the dean with their complaint. Thanks to this example, I make a huge point about how I'm trying really hard to cut down, but that when I get really going thinking with other people, I often cuss without realizing it. I tell them that they should feel extremely welcome to let me know, if they ever, ever feel that my swearing, or anything else in the classroom, makes them feel uncomfortable. I tell 'em that I happily accept this feedback in any form, that they can cut and paste letters out of a newspaper to write me a note, if they want to stay anonymous.

One of my church girls finally took me up on the offer this term! She wrote me the most wonderful, professional, sweeeeeet email about it. She explained that she had recently decided to give up the habit herself, that she's helping her friends stop swearing, and that she would really appreciate it if I would try to cut down even more. It was great. She made sure to tell me how much she liked my class, too, and even offered me specific examples to show why. It was genuinely one of my proudest moments as a teacher.

Hmmm... These girls--and their brothers in scholarship, too, of course---they're making a pretty warm little sun at the center of my term. Thank god, too, buried as I am in the consequences of my failures in planning! If I had a bunch of sullen little too-cool-for-skools this term, I think I finally would take to drink.

Well, as I type away here, I notice my dishes haven't washed themselves. I have a super-fucking-ton of grading to do, and more planning, as well as some re-planning. My dad will be here in about 10 minutes to drop off a bunch of stuff for my stepmother's birthday party this weekend. (We're hosting. I don't even want to think about writing about that.) I gotta clean the house for 60 guests. Hoo-boy.

No time to give into a powerful tiredness or malaise. I gotta pick up my bed and walk. After all, as my church girl wrote in her essay, "even if you think you dn't have theres allways time to set youre house in order." I shall begin with the dishes.

Glad to say. Namaste.

I'm coffee-ing up, getting ready to grade like a madwoman, before I have to go to work at My Bar tonight. My way too self-indulgent (in that it leads me to postponing my work too long every single day) morning ritual on days I don't have to be in early is to read my way around interesting stuff on the internet. Today, I'm hyperlinking my way through essays on Buffy, 'cause why not, right? It's just an endlessly interesting text.

So I'm reading an archived post on Salon about the fifth season episode, "The Body," an impressively minimalist treatment of the death of a parent. It's a smart post, which could mean just that I agree with it, of course, but regardless, I'm fast becoming a fan of Joyce Millman. Which is a bit of a shame, because I think she's no longer writing with Salon--I am always behind trends. Sigh.

At any rate, in the middle of the second page, I come on this summary of a fourth season episode, "Hush:"

In last season's hair-raising "Hush" episode (which unexpectedly received an Emmy nomination for best writing), Whedon experimented with the power of silence as a storytelling device. Grinning, skull-headed, eerily gliding demons had stolen the voices of everyone in Sunnydale (to prevent screams when they cut people's hearts out), so Whedon staged the second half of the episode like a silent movie, using pantomime and notes written on cards, chalkboards and computer screens in place of dialogue.

This is a great summary, and "Hush" is a great episode that deserves all the positive critical attention it got. I only take issue with one point here, and that is "chalkboards." I think Millman's right; I'm pretty sure the characters do write on a chalkboard at some point or another, maybe a few points. But I'm disappointed that Millman chooses this medium in her short list, instead of "whiteboards." In "Hush," Willow and Tara, characters who represent young-woman intelligence at its best, communicate by way of the little whiteboards teenagers put on their lockers and dorm-room doors. As a teacher of composition, this detail matters to me because these characters communicate important plot information via student literacies and genres.

The conflict between established, privileged academic literacies and new, freewheeling, student literacies runs as a minor thread through Buffy. Giles, Buffy's Watcher (the adult mentor who guides each Vampire Slayer through her career), is a librarian in the most lovely oldfashioned sense--he loves the actual page and all the rituals of bookcare--storing them, organizing them, carefully turning their aged leaves. So turned off and put off by digital literacies that he can't even really manipulate a keyboard, Giles relies on Willow to get him through the crazy web of the internet. Members of the Scooby Gang (the teenaged friends and co-evil-fighters of Buffy) make constant jokes at Giles' expense regarding his love for what they perceive as antiquated, labor-intensive literacy practices.

I don't mean to say that the show makes a simple binary out of the hardcopy/digital divide, nor that it comes down solidly on the side of the digital, not at all. Grumbling aside, the Scooby gang spends very productive hours engaging closely with Giles' books, in which they discover all manner of solutions to nasty demon-killing problems. Willow, who is the gold-standard of student cool on this show, may be wicked fast at the worldwide web, but she also super loves books. Over time, Giles begins to appreciate the internet more and more, as well. In later seasons, when Willow takes over Giles' position as group advisor and head researcher, she uses both modes equally.

Where am I going with this post? I heart Buffy for a zillion reasons, and its inclusive treatment of established and new literacies is one of them. Buffy never throws traditional research practices and resources on the dust heap for good, and it also never pulls the plug on new, innnovative literacies. When Willow and Tara need to tell the rest of the gang something important, but have no voice, they do so through a student genre--the portable whiteboard.

As a composition teacher, it's really important to me to create classes that strike the same balance as Buffy does between these modes of knowing through text. I really believe that if we want to teach as Ghandi would have us do--"There go my [students.] I am their [teacher]. I must go and catch up with them."--and I think we must, if we are to prepare them to read, write, and think in the world as it actually is and is becoming, then we absolutely must create assignments and courses that privilege student genres and literacies. We have to be willing, as Giles is, to defer to our students' expertise in a world that, after all, they are creating and they will be operating in. We can, and should, as Giles does, insist that they grapple with the literacy practices of institutionalized power, but we can and should, also, insist that they teach us and each other more about those literacy practices that have not yet gained similar status.

I talk with my students about this stuff, and I do some work with them that allows them to draw on their existing literacies and genres. In their process work, I encourage them to use the language they're most comfortable with, like the abbreviations and letter/number hybrids of IM. Nonetheless, I haven't yet built an assignment which requires them to use student genres/literacies, like writing an entire essay in IM, or translating a course reading into their home slang. I need to get on this stick.

Hmmm....

I got another class today, from the community college. So that brings the winter total to four classes, 2 that pay a reasonable amount and 2 that pay about 2/3 of that. I do believe it's just barely enough to make the bills, and that ain't nothing to sneeze at. :)

Winter will be interesting. Two more sections of the research-writing course at My Institution will give me a solid foundation of the known. They'll be like a nice, comfortable breathing room, while I figure out the other two that I've never taught. From the community college, I've got an Intro to Workplace Writing--email, memo, letter of inquiry, resume, etc. Soooo looking forward to that one. I see it as helping a student population grow some much-needed sharp-teeth-and-claws of the rhetorical variety. It's all personal marketing, framing the self in terms of strengths and potential, and surface conventions glitz-n-glam. Fun stuff fer a wild textual outlaw/nerd like me. And I've got a freshman comp from them, which should be really pretty fun.

I'm still a little nervous, but in a nice way. Instead of the total panic I felt when I was brand-new at this gig, the surging pressure not to botch the whole thing completely for 25 paying-customer students, I just kind of feel like, "Sweet--I could use something new to think about and play around with." I do believe I can say that I finally feel like I've got the beginning of some professional teaching chops, some solid ground under me, and like I can trust myself to at least do no harm.

Or at least not much harm.

Glad to Say.

Cripes. When I posted the most recent Beloit College Mindset list, I did the search wrong. Here's the right one:

One of my mentors sent this link out today. The Beloit College Mindset List captures a sense of the divide between incoming college freshpeople and the folks who probably teach them by listing a sampling of the [pop] culture referents for the newbies to the higher academic scene. Thought some of you Voxers might get a kick out of it:

1. Most students entering college this fall were born in 1986.
2. Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison, Ted Bundy, Ayatollah Khomeini and Cary Grant have always been dead.
3. "Here's Johnny!" is a scary greeting from Jack Nicholson, not a warm welcome from Ed McMahon.
4. The Energizer bunny has always been going, and going, and going.
5. Large fine-print ads for prescription drugs have always appeared in magazines.
6. Photographs have always been processed in an hour or less.
7. They never got a chance to drink 7-Up Gold, Crystal Pepsi, or Apple Slice.
8. Baby Jessica could be a classmate.
9. Parents may have been reading The Bourne Supremacy or It as they rocked them in their cradles.
10. Alan Greenspan has always been setting the nation's financial direction.
11. The U.S. has always been a Prozac nation.
12. They have always enjoyed the comfort of pleather.
13. Harry has always known Sally.
14. They never saw Roseanne Rosannadanna live on Saturday Night Live.
15. There has always been a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
16. They never ate a McSub at McD's.
17. There has always been a Comedy Channel.
18. Bill and Ted have always been on an excellent adventure.
19. They were never tempted by smokeless cigarettes.
20. Robert Downey, Jr. has always been in trouble.
21. Martha Stewart has always been cooking up something with someone.
22. They have always been comfortable with gay characters on television.
23. Mike Tyson has always been a contender.
24. The government has always been proposing we go to Mars, and it has always been deemed too expensive.
25. There have never been any Playboy Clubs.
26. There have always been night games at Wrigley Field.
27. Rogaine has always been available for the follicularly challenged.
28. They never saw USA Today or the Christian Science Monitor as a TV news program.
29. Computers have always suffered from viruses.
30. We have always been mapping the human genome.
31. Politicians have always used rock music for theme songs.
32. Network television has always struggled to keep up with cable.
33. O'Hare has always been the most delay-plagued airport in the U.S.
34. Ivan Boesky has never sold stock.
35. Toll-free 800 phone numbers have always spelled out catchy phrases.
36. Bethlehem has never been a place of peace at Christmas.
37. Episcopal women bishops have always threatened the foundation of the Anglican Church.
38. Svelte Oprah has always dominated afternoon television; who was Phil Donahue anyway?
39. They never flew on People Express.
40. AZT has always been used to treat AIDS.
41. The international community has always been installing or removing the leader of Haiti.
42. Oliver North has always been a talk show host and news commentator.
43. They have suffered through airport security systems since they were in strollers.
44. They have done most of their search for the right college online.
45. Aspirin has always been used to reduce the risk of a heart attack.
46. They were spared the TV ads for Zamfir and his panpipes.
47. Castro has always been an aging politician in a suit.
48. There have always been non-stop flights around the world without refueling.
49. Cher hasn't aged a day.
50. M.A.S.H. was a game: Mansion, Apartment, Shelter, House.

Well, I'm officially enjoying just being a regular human being with a job, again. Granted, I'm currently a human being with three jobs, but that just about adds up to enough to cover the rent, so that's just fine. Turned in my forms to Academic HR today, so I should be set for the 2 sections of Research-Writing I was given at My Institution for fall, and tomorrow I'll call and pester my boss at The Community College to get her to confirm my section of Argumentative Writing over there. I still have my section of Non-Western Lit there, but there's been yet another snafu in re: Arg. I have great confidence it'll all work out. Plus, I have at least one night a week at My Bar, starting this Friday. So that's Good, 3, Bad, 0, at the moment.

A mentor of mine, the guy I TA'd for in Jewish American Lit last term, also put me onto a position at My Institution, which I'm applying for tomorrow. It's Assistant Director of the Honors Program, so it's administrative, but it's through Student Affairs, and it has promise. First and foremost, it promises between $42k and $49k to start, plus all the assorted benefits one gets for an 8-5 gig. That would make a huge difference in our family stress level right now. SLP is a loan officer, and if you've been paying attention to the news lately, I don't have to tell you how much sleep we're losing around that job right now. Not to mention that he's just absolutely not a loan officer. He hates working on a commission-only basis, obviously, I suppose, and just feels that his job is soulless and every kind of intellectually underwhelming. He's been working on finishing his bachelor's for the last year, having left it years ago for a job, and will finish with a pretty hireable degree in April, and it's conceivable that he would be able to just leave the mortgage gig now and just do school full-time instead, which would mean he'd get done in December. It would be soooooooooooo unbelievably awesome to give him that time and freedom, and it would move us in a positive direction faster.

From what I already know about the Honors gig, it also seems to promise a real opportunity to serve the students at My Institution. We're not a first-tier university, and the vast majority of our students are facing an assortment of challenges to their dreams. Either they're non-traditional, broke, coming from crappy school systems, coming from getting laid off, coming from sociocultural groups that generally get the shaft in hiring and whatnot, or some combination of all of these. It seems that this position would allow me to aggressively recruit from the groups that most often get overlooked by professors who notice kids for the Honors program. So it would mean I'd still be helping people appropriate the discourses, practices, and resources that lead to empowered professional and civic lives.

Of course, it would also mean that I would not be teaching, and that I'm definitely not glad about. I love to teach, I'm good at it, and I wannnnnnnnnt to do it. Like soooooo want to do it. I've been building toward a full-time teaching gig steadily for years, and it's hard to think about just taking a left-turn off that path. At least one mentor I've consulted thinks I could still be a viable candidate for a teaching job if I only held this one for a couple years, so it wouldn't necessarily mean shutting a door and locking it.

And did I mention I haven't even applied yet? ;) I don't even know I'll get an interview. So I'm going to submit my stuff tomorrow, and get to work planning my courses for fall, and just see what happens. May the chips fall where they may.

Ok, here's the intro to process I just wrote up for my students, along with the responsive writing I'm assigning with it. The reading assignment is intended to get us all on the more or less same page about the practices we'll be using for the rest of the term. The writing assignment is low-stakes, largely a Stock-Taking exercise for them to use to start positioning themselves as researchers with an existing set of expertise and model of attack.

Read/Write Assignment, DUE 6/12, typed, double-spaced
First, the Read part:
 
The Un- and Re-Searched Argument: A Journey
 
In the next two months of English 226, we’re going to work through a process of research-writing, in two, overlapping units. In the first unit, the Un-Searched Argument, you’ll begin to develop your thinking about an issue that’s important to you. In the second unit, the Re-Searched Argument, you’ll engage with outside sources to enrich, deepen, and refine your thinking about said issue.
 
As we begin this process, I think it’s helpful to spend a minute thinking about what research is in the first place. The word “research” comes from the French word rechercher, meaning “to search again; to examine anew” (emphasis mine). Like writing, research doesn’t begin with us knowing nothing, nor does it begin with us knowing everything. Like writing, research is an ongoing process, not an event or a task. In fact, in my experience, reading and writing (and viewing and listening and whatever) are all one great, big, lifelong research process.
 
Generally, writing doesn’t mean having a brain full of a perfectly, completely thought-through essay and then just taking it out of the brain and putting it on the page. Instead, writing usually begins with having a brainful of interesting ideas, images, and memories percolating and beginning to make a bunch of cool connections. We don’t actually figure all that out until we work on translating it into words, sentences, and paragraphs. Of course, the writing process doesn’t stop there. Once we’ve got a draft going, we take a break, get some feedback from real readers, i.e. teachers and class colleagues. Then, we sit back down at the keyboard and make some cool changes to our draft. Sometimes we repeat the last two steps a number of times. 
 
Research-writing works much the same way. In fact, the writing process generally is usually a research-writing process anyway, even if it doesn’t seem like one. We start out the same way—with the same mess of ideas, images, and memories—we start out with what we already know and are interested in. At this point, we usually do some Stock-Taking Writing—writing where the whole point is just to get clear about what we do know already, and what we think we probably don’t know yet, and probably should find out more about. If we’re lucky, we get some feedback on this Stock-Taking. This kind of feedback is about the thinking we’re doing, not about the writing, per se.
 
Then, we go out looking for sources of information and perspectives that can help us learn more about the topic we’re writing about. We usually go to the library, looking for articles in scholarly journals, reliable popular magazines, and reliable web sites. We skim a lot of stuff that doesn’t quite fit our needs/interests, until we find a few really awesome sources that are rich in the kinds of information and perspectives we want to learn more about.
 
When we find these, we read them deeply, really putting them into dialogue with our existing thinking. We open up our own ideas and allow the new stuff we’re reading to come in and change things up. Of course, since at this point we’re kind of all-ears and all-eyes for anything that connects to our research interest, we also find sources in unexpected places. We see a television program that turns out to be relevant to our thinking. We overhear a conversation at work about the issue we’re investigating, and ask our co-workers a bunch of questions. Whatever—the point is we’re sucking relevant information in from every opportunity, and mixing it into our initial ideas. Then, we sit down and do some more writing—Dialogue/Analysis/Reflection Writing—to help us put the old and new together and figure out how things have come out. Again, if we’re lucky, we get some more feedback at this point.
 
Finally, after a bunch of this, we feel ready to start getting to work on Drafting. We re-read all the Stock-Taking and Dialogue/Analysis/Reflection we’ve done so far. We take a break and just do other stuff for a day or two, and let everything percolate in our heads. We start doing some more thinking about Primary Audience, Behavior Change, and Primary Claim, as we begin to organize our thinking. And then, finally, we sit down at the keyboard and hammer out a Reader Review Draft of our essay. And after that, you already know what happens—feedback, revision, and so on.
 
Phew.
 
Ok, this, in a nutshell, is what we’re going to be doing for the rest of the term.
 
 

And now, the Write part:
 
Having read the above ramblings, please respond to the following prompts, in a paragraph or so each (typed, double-spaced):