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I've returned from my sister's to face various unpleasantnesses, but in the realm of good news, I'm *very* pleased to say that she responded to the cerclage (and, really, the week of total bed rest) well enough that she's back on modified bed rest now. This is tremendously good. She can walk around for longer than it takes to go to the bathroom and return; she can stand for brief periods; she can go outside; and, most importantly, *she*can*pick*up*her*son*and*put*him*to*bed.*
I've written before about the heart-wrenching few years my sister, W2, has had. It seems they aren't over yet: at 22 weeks pregnant, she's been put on 100% bedrest because her cervix is shortening (which precedes actual dilation).
We know that this is happening because Bumblebee was born at 26.5 weeks about eighteen months ago. There's no clear medical reason for his premature arrival (the technical diagnosis was "spontaneous cervical dilation"), but as a result this pregnancy has been monitored closely. And that has turned out to be a deeply good thing, since her doctor thinks that this little girl is trying to follow her big brother's path into the world. And right now, we're all hoping really hard that she won't.
I'm off across the country the day after tomorrow to try to help out. I think of it as buying them the time to find a nanny they're fully comfortable with. My mother will arrive a few days after I leave, while Top Gun goes to New State to close on their house. (They move in June -- and, yes, we're all trying to figure out how that one' s going to work.)
In short term, what I need most for W2 are book recommendations: all-absorbing, take-your-mind-off-it pleasure reads. Any ideas? She's partial to young adult fantasy, but, really, it's all about sending her to another world every night after Bumblebee goes to bed.
Update, 11:30 AM Friday: In the round-robin that is familial communication at such times, I just heard from my mother, who heard from Top Gun, that W2 is currently in the hospital having a cerclage done. The ultrasound showed that she'd responded quickly and well to the two days of complete bed rest, so there's reason to be hopeful.
Unclutterer talks about time, quoting H. Jackson Brown:
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Sigh.
I say versions of this all the time -- and this is not to suggest that I think that I don't waste a perfectly respectable amount of time -- but I don't see any people on that list who were responsible for domestic labor. No one, in other words, who was also cooking, cleaning, and raising children.
Let's be careful about the standards we set for ourselves. Otherwise we set ourselves up for failure, and teach our children to be unforgiving of their own imperfections.
I've been reading essays for departmental prizes all week, and am about to turn to the theses under consideration for our thesis prize. And I have to say that I *hate* reading student writing under these circumstances. It's the worst end of grading: purely evaluative (and without the ability to make fine distinctions), with no possibility of substantive feedback.
I will say, though, that I'm generally more impressed with the quality of the papers submitted by frosh and sophs than by juniors and seniors. While the latter are more ambitious in some very good and impressive ways, they're also more colonized by the worst qualities of academic writing: nominalizations, abstract grammatical subjects, inflated diction, etc. These are essays from across the college, not just from my own department. What are we teaching them?
There's a discussion going on over at The Valve about arguments in academic writing. We humanists seem to need to have this conversation periodically, particularly in the last couple of decades, over whether or not we make "arguments" and, of course, what exactly we mean when we say that we do or we don't. I think that we make arguments. But I think that "argument" means something slightly different in academic discourse than it means in popular discourse, and I think that this difference confuses all of us.
Because I think that at their best, academic arguments aren't nearly as oppositional as popular arguments are. They engage with other thinkers' and writers' ideas in order to develop and advance an idea or interpretation. But "engagement" doesn't have to mean "disagreement." Versions of this idea inform both Joe Harris' textbook Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts and the pedagogy of the Rutgers Writing Program. At their best, academic arguments -- or, rather, at its best, academic inquiry -- seeks answers to pressing intellectual puzzles or problems or questions. Those puzzles might arise from a sense that criticism had been blind to the complexities or nuances of a particular text, or that it as overlooked certain crucial issues; or they might arise from a reading of critical disagreements; or they might arise from the realization that a certain idea or issue or question or theory helps us understand something better than we did before. In order to develop a response to the puzzle, you're going to have to make assertions. And offer evidence (which must be analyzed to be evidence). And you're going to have to engage with the ideas and writings of others.
It's not "argument" in the sense that Op-ed pieces are "arguments." But it's more than "insight" or "description" because it cares about the implications or broader significance of the initial insight that gives it birth.
. . . and perhaps one that's as worth thinking about as what some of the richer privates have done.
| You Are a Semi-Colon |
 You're very smart (and you know it), but you don't often showcase your brilliance. Instead, you carefully construct your arguments, ideas, and theories – until they are bulletproof. You see your words as an expression of yourself, and you are careful not to waste them. You friends see you as enlightened, logical, and shrewd. (But what you're saying often goes right over their heads.) You excel in: The Arts You get along best with: The Colon |
In response to my last (substantive) post, What Now? asks how I structure workshops. (No, I didn't plant her, really.) I've been doing draft workshops in writing classes routinely since 2001; at this point, they're such an ingrained part of my pedagogy that I can't imagine life without them. I think that students learn an enormous amount about diagnosing and revising their own work by reading the work of others, and I also think that group workshops teach them that papers aren't love letters to the professor (as one illustrious colleague puts it). I also think that draft workshops are invaluable in modeling how to give feedback.
Since workshops are essential to my first-year seminar, I tell students at the outset 1) that we will workshop a draft or part of a draft from everyone over the course of the semester; 2) that they will have the opportunity to volunteer, but that in some cases I will choose the workshoppees; and 3) that their names will be on the papers when they're circulated.
(I now also tell them to let me know if they think that this will be really painful for them; this lets me avoid the disaster I wrote about earlier. I let those students know that they should be on the look-out for a good opportunity to volunteer.)
The first workshop comes in the second or early in the third week of class. I structure it pretty heavily, because I want them to learn how to do this. As a result of being heavy-handed early on, I can scale things back later in the semester. What I'm going to describe here are our most formal workshops, which I call "Draft Workshops" on the syllabus. We spend about 60 minutes talking about two students' drafts. I distribute the drafts in advance of class, and all students have to read the drafts, write marginal comments, and a letter to the author. And I give them instructions about the letters. (See, I told you I was heavy-handed.) It should start out by describing what you think the paper is arguing; what you think is the best thing about the paper; and finally what kinds of things the author should do to revise.
(For these formal Draft Workshops, I choose the workshoppees and email them a heads-up before I circulate the papers. I choose papers from the middle of the range, that exhibit with particular clarity issues that I think all the students can usefully think about. I tell students in advance that these are my criteria.)
Only I'm a lot more specific about what I ask students to think about for the first workshop than I am later in the semester, because I want the students to learn that "revise" means something more than "tweak." For the first workshop, we typically focus on thesis, motive*, and structure. We've done some work with the first two concepts already, so my instructions ask students to "identify and evaluate" both of those elements of the drafts they're reading. They should then map the structure of the draft by identifying the main point of each paragraph, and make a few recommendations on the basis of all these observations.
This is basically what we do in class, as well. I lay down the following ground rules (which I've poached from Kerry Walk):
Often, in this first workshop, we reinvent the thesis ("look, there's this super-cool argument that emerges on page 4!") and then map out a new structure for the essay. That's a pretty significant lesson in what revision can entail, all by itself. My task in the workshop after I get the ball rolling is usually to make general points that extend the students' local observations, and to push students to brainstorm ideas for revision.
I don't do very much reflective or personal writing in my courses. This is a bit heretical in my field -- at least in some sectors of it. But I do ask students, at the end of the first draft workshop, to reflect in writing on what they learned that will help them in revising their papers. I want them to make the connection as quickly as possible that they can get something for themselves out of thinking about how to kick someone else's paper up a notch. I don't collect these writings; it's something that they do for themselves.
While I do peer review in pairs or small groups as well, and I generally find that I like the ways these work best when they're pretty well structured** and in class, or towards the end of the semester with a group of students who've really "gotten" the point of peer review. Sometimes you have a group that's so focused on professorial feedback that it's really hard to get them to realize that they can get something from one another . . . although even then I make them do it, and just structure it more.
* "motive" and lots of other concepts that I use come from Gordon Harvey's "Elements of the Essay." How those concepts organize my teaching will how to wait for another post.
**I don't like doing "worksheets" for peer review, although I know a lot of people who swear by it. Instead, I give instructions about issues to focus on while reading and to include in the letters they write to one another -- writing a letter is a really important part of it, to my mind, since that dramatizes the experience of a reader.
my high school boyfriend's younger brother just found me on Facebook.
In the midst of the chaos of last week (Thursday evening, to be precise), I needed to write a statement reflecting on and contextualizing two bad sets of course evaluations. I thought that I'd post it here, as well:
To [big deal committee]:
I asked if it would be appropriate for me to write a brief letter contextualizing my course evaluations for you all. While I think that the evaluations from this past fall can stand on their own, I feel apologetic about those from my first year [here], and want to offer both context for and reflections on them. They are more negative than those I’ve typically received, and the way they still trouble me is probably both a result of that and of how seriously I take student responses and feedback.
In the fall of 2005 I taught [a course] on literary representations of [a major cultural issue] called “[Here and Now].” I faced two significant challenges in this class, both of which had to do with students’ and my differing understandings of the goals of the course. I was interested in how texts [from certain times and places] try to delineate lines between [here and now] and, in doing so, reveal them to be mutually constitutive. But while I emphasized that we would be looking at literary representations in the course description, many of the students had thought they were choosing [a course] focused on history and politics. They were angry at what seemed to feel to them like a bait and switch, and were further angered by their inability to change out of the course [as a result of college and program policy]. In addition, that fall I was still learning about [the program] and its place [here]. My seminar was (and still is, frankly) much more focused on writing than many other [courses in the program]. But in that first semester, I failed to explain the reason(s) behind that focus on writing to the students. I believe deeply that we need to be explicit in our teaching. While I want students to struggle in certain ways in my classes – I want them to have to work to figure out how to approach an assignment, because I believe that much of their best learning comes through that struggle – I think that it’s my responsibility to explain that logic to them. I want them to hear – and, hopefully, to believe – that the difficulty will ultimately make them better, more engaged and critical, thinkers. It’s clear to me in retrospect that I didn’t explain that clearly to them that semester.
I don’t shy away from classes that are inherently difficult to teach. I welcomed the chance to teach the Thesis Seminar this year despite a department-wide consensus that it was [really hard to teach]. In the spring of 2006, I taught a course that I proposed as a replacement for [a required basic writing course]; [this course] nevertheless still had all the stigma of a “remedial” course that students felt more or less forced to take. (The fact that that “forcing” was through the encouragement of advisors seemed to make little difference.) While I developed good relationships with several of the individual students, and I’m deeply proud of how several of them have done [here], the course as a whole never jelled; it never gained the kind of energy and momentum a course without such stigma can. I think that here, too, I might have been able to change things. It may have been that a different thematic focus might have given students more purchase on the task of academic writing, and given them a greater sense of stake in the assignments. In this course, as well, I made a crucial misjudgment early on. I workshop student papers frequently throughout the semester in my writing courses; students know this from the outset, and after the first round often volunteer to have their papers workshopped. I choose the first participants carefully, trying to identify after only a couple of classes the students who will be receptive to receiving feedback in this way. In this class, I was precisely wrong in one of my choices. This student’s response to having [m's] paper workshopped was to feel a deep sense of shame; rather than seeing the workshop as a collaborative effort to help [m] take [m's] paper to the next level, [m] saw it as a public exposure of flaws [m] wasn’t willing to admit. (I was utterly unprepared for the strength of [m's] reaction; I’ve never come across a student so resistant to feedback in 13 years of teaching writing.) While I think that [m] learned a bit in the course despite herself, the failure of that workshop set a tone that was difficult for the group as a whole to overcome. Although I had always been careful in how I framed those workshops, I’ve become even more so. And in a questionnaire at the beginning of the semester, I ask students to let me know if they think that having their work discussed in the big group will be particularly painful for them.
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