Writing Maternity

an excellent compliment

From a student, today:

"I always used to half-jokingly remark, 'I'm an English major; I don't know anything practical.' After this class, I won't say that anymore."

yep, that's a corner I've backed myself into

Last spring, because I convinced the school to create a second writing position, I was able to propose and have approved a theories of writing course that doubles as the training course for the writing tutors.

Because this is the first time that the tutors are being required to do anything remotely this formal, I gave all the new hires the option of taking the course or doing a modified version as a directed reading.  I did this, in part, because I didn't want to lose all the science majors I might otherwise be able to hire, whose schedules in the fall of sophomore year are full to bursting already.

Well, of course, 6 of the 8 new tutors have opted for the directed reading.  (I still have 8 students in the course, so that's fine.)

And, of course, their schedules are such that I'll be doing two separate meetings every week for this additional course.

Like I said, it's quite a corner.

writing metaphor(s)

After a discussion of particular metaphors for writing and the writing process today in class, and prefacing another discussion about why metaphor in particular might be useful in helping us thinking about writing, I asked the students what their metaphors for writing were.  It's a good list; here are some of the highlights:

rare meat (because you could always cook it a bit more)

a game of chess (because you need to plan, to think about your opponent, and be open to change)

a chalkboard (because you need to map out a jumble in two dimensions, and because everyone can then see it)

walking through a dark room (because it might be different than you expect, and because you'll become acclimated to how things look different)

tying your shoes (because there are lots of different ways to do it, and because it takes time to learn)

people (because from a distance a group can look homogeneous or unified, but when you get closer the individuals -- people, words -- come into focus and each have their own role to play)

hosting a party (because it takes a lot of advance planning, because it involves others, because you can't control all the variables)

How would you describe writing?

what is "college-level" writing?

That's the title of today's anthology.  Unlike yesterday's, it isn't doing quite what I'd hoped it would.  I thought I was reading it for the faculty development extravaganza I'm leading in a couple of weeks for the folks who will teach in our first-year seminar program in the fall.  It turns out that, instead, I'm reading it more for my fall course.

Specifically, I realized that in a unit in the course on "Readers (Expectations & Feedback)," I'm going to have the students read some of the essays and then write their own reflective piece in which they try to answer the titular question.  (I'm really interested to see their answers.)

As fodder and also models, I'll be sure to give them some of the student-authored piece that the anthology includes, particularly the one by Amanda Winalski, who graduated in 2004 from Temple.  After placing out of Temple's first-year writing requirement, Amanda found herself rewarded for the style of her writing until, in a linguistics class, the professor slammed her for not addressing the assignment. 

She was shocked and mortified; after reflecting on the experience, she offers her insights:

A college writer must anticipate the reader’s response.  Once the writer has conquered the grammar check and can confidently justify using the passive voice or splitting an infinitive, he or she begins to demonstrate a level of comprehension and application that I would consider characteristic of the college-level label.  Those who bow before the grammar check and heed every suggestion—whether because they doubt their abilities, overestimate the power of the computerized rulebook, or think the reader will use any grammatical error as evidence of ineptitude or justification for a grade reduction—can only improve their writing by first tending to their confidence.

There does not (yet) exist a checklist for the requirements that compose college-level writing.  The transition from high school to university writing is not as simple as the memorization of a few grammar handouts; rather, it consists of a student’s willingness to learn, understand, and modify the rules that govern language in order to communicate ideas.  One can easily write five pages of nothing that sounds lyrical or drainingly intellectual or fill five pages with brilliant thoughts that are presented in bullet statements.  To achieve a balance between the two is to be a successful college writer; it is a goal to which one must aspire every time he or she picks up a pen.  Thus, writing at this level is perhaps an ongoing process that necessitates a persistent willing-[end 307]-ness to try, fail, and try.  (307-08)

While I'm excited to simply get the students to write these and to see what they'll see, thinking this concretely about one of the assignments is making me realize how essential written dialogue is going to be for this course.  These need to be blog posts, dammit!  So that they can engage directly with one another's observations, building off of similar and different experiences.  I'd been thinking that I wouldn't do a blog next semester: many of these students will be working in the Writing Center or with students in first-year seminars; in the sections where we're talking about feedback, conferencing, and the like, I'll want them to be able to reflect on that work -- but I don't want to compromise anyone's confidentiality.  I'm thinking, then, that I'll have to learn how to do this within Sakai, our CMS.

Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

That's the title of the book that arrived yesterday, and that I'm now devouring.  It's an anthology edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and it's proving a smart, varied, thoughtful collection.  Here's a great series of questions from Eisner and Vicinus' introduction:

• How do we conserve and inculcate a tradition of ethical research and writing standards, while acknowledging and taking full advantage of the opportunities provided by new technologies?
• How can students be taught to evaluate sources and then credit the authors appropriately?
• Why have so many experienced researchers been found guilty of stealing from others?
• How can we encourage the free and ethical exchange of ideas?
• How can we encourage students, so accustomed to digital sharing, to understand citation practices, free use, and the legitimate ownership of ideas?

Not a question, but I can't leave you without this, too: "All too often these queries [that writing centers face about plagiarism] are framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for either the teacher or the student to understand the complexities of permission, atttribution, and copyright.  Teachers find themselves placed in an adversarial position in relation to students, as if all writing assignments involved the risk of plagiarism. . . . Across disciplines and fields, we find that plagiarism is not a simple wrong; a full understanding of its role in contemporary intellectual life depends on a broad approach that includes notions of what is original and what role imitation plays in the creation of new texts" (1).

I'd already been pretty sure that this anthology would give me material for the cornerstone of a unit on these issues for my fall course on theories of writing and pedagogy; now I'm certain.

Peer Workshops

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):

• The author doesn't speak for the first 5-10 minutes.
• We start out by saying what we like about the paper.
• We then identify its thesis and motive.
• We then identify issues that confuse us, or that we feel get in the way of the complete development of the paper's argument.
• We then brainstorm a revision.

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.

reflections

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.

ladies and gentleman, they've crossed the finish line

It was thesis day today, and I'm pleased and a bit proud to be able to announce that when I left the office at 4:30 every single student had turned in his or her thesis.  There was one surprise -- a detail-oriented and responsible student who somehow managed to forget that she was supposed to turn in more than one copy -- but it was otherwise utterly smooth sailing.

I'm pleased because writing a reasonably coherent 60+-page research paper at 22 is not a small achievement, and they've all achieved it.  I'm proud -- and it's a fairly parental kind of pride -- because I know that my deadlines and feedback helped each of them make it to the finish line.  And that's really cool.

It's interesting to note in passing that the two last theses to come in were two of the three that were the farthest along when I read drafts ten days ago.  Since one of those students is my advisee, I know that she was working her tail off all week; and I'm betting that the other student was doing the same.  The department assistant told me that the the two students who turned them in first had, in fact, had a pact that they would do so.  I found this sweet but also strange, that turning in your thesis earlier on the day it was due than others should be a goal.  There are all different kinds of writers in the world -- and while most of us need the adrenaline rush of the deadline, it varies pretty widely how closely we actually want to cut it.  For a whole variety of reasons, I've been willing to cut it closer and closer as I've gotten older.

It's been a rocky road with these nine students.  I wrote about this -- obliquely and not-so-obliquely -- last semester.  The group as a whole never really cohered, and I can see this as clearly as ever as I read their acknowledgments: there was one group of three; another group of four; and then two others, more on their own.  While that's inevitable, I wish that they had played more nicely with one another over the course of the fall; and while I have a sense of having done some good things with this seminar (and it was one of the harder teaching gigs I've had), I have an ongoing sense of failure about not having found ways to make the big group work. 

My own undergrad thesis advisor joked with me at one point that spring that on the day theses are due you would find faculty in the department office looking over the acknowledgments their students had written.  And it's interesting how true that is, now that I'm on the other side.  But, you know, we do work hard for our students; and it's really nice to be thanked.

rbo wednesday

• I've read and responded two four of the nine thesis drafts.  They're all coming in at 70+ pages, so this is not small.  The bad news is that I really have to finish them by the end of the day on Friday, and I have four hours of meetings tomorrow.
• I've made three people quite happy by calling to tell them that they're finalists for a good job.  It's nice to be on this side of the academic job market.
• I've just sent out 52 (yep) invitations to students to apply to work as Writing Center tutors.  Surprisingly enough, precisely 50% are male and 50% are female. I'm curious to see what the return rate by gender is.  Bet it ain't 50/50.
• Tricksy has what might be her first serious verb ("come!") and what I'm quite certain is her first three-word phrase ("I got it!" or, in Tricksese, "Igollih," with the "l" well-swallowed and preferably said multiple times in conjunction, thus: igollihigollihigollihIGOLLIH!)  (Parents sometimes take a while to clue in.)

And, with that, it's time for bed.

thesis watch 2008

(updated at 8:38 PM, PST) (and again at 10:12 PM) (the last one came in at 6:30 Tuesday morning, but this means that we're good -- they'll all finish, at least.  whew.)

As the conductor of the departmental thesis seminar this year, it largely falls to me to set and police the deadlines before The deadline next Friday.  So at the beginning of the semester I told them that they needed to give me a complete draft by March 24th at the latest.

There are nine students writing theses this year.  (We started the year with 12, but there was a bit of attrition.  Students can complete the major and graduate without departmental honors without writing a thesis.)

As of now, I have drafts from 5 8.  I'm confident that I'll see solid(ish) drafts by the end of the day from 2 more.  The last 2 have me worried. One of the two that came in this evening was one of the two that I was worried about -- the other was pretty certain to come in when and as it did.  Two are still out-standing.  The only one left is -- oh, dear! -- the one I've been most worried about for some time.  The student's advisor has been telling em quite directly for weeks that it was time to panic, and at this point I'm just hoping that em pulls off something em doesn't feel ashamed about by the final deadline .... I do think that em'll manage to finish, but I'm not even completely certain about that ...