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Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Apparently the “white people pride” discussion did NOT go well, because now I have a student who wants to write about National Socialism and how racism “isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” that the preservation of the white race is “just like” the preservation of a rare species of songbird. Oh, and the swastika? Sure, there was that Hitler problem, but it’s really just an old symbol of power.
I honestly, truthfully have no idea how to handle this — partly because, I mean, holy shit, you really want to defend racism and white pride in my class? I’m also kind of pissed because he clearly didn’t listen or think about anything anyone but he said in the previous class conversation about “white people pride.” But mostly, I want to figure out how to actually teach him to open his mind to ways of thinking he’s currently closed to. And I don’t have any fucking clue how to do that on a topic like this.
Here’s the thing: I could shut him down and say, “No, that’s not an appropriate topic.” And what exactly is that going to do? Is that going to open his eyes to the fact that, oh yeah, racism is bad? No. Shutting down a conversation just allows racism to fester, hidden away.
Yet if I allow him to research this, how can I do it in a way that opens his eyes to truly understand the issue — in a way that doesn’t just allow him to reinforce what he already believes?
– That would be easy, you’d think, after I tell you that when I teach “research” writing at the Pen, I do all the research for my students because, by the by, they have no access to a library or inter-library loans. So I control what information they get. Voila!, right? Just give him the stuff I want him to read?
Yeah, no. That will be totally transparent to him. These guys aren’t dumb. He knows there’s plenty of information out there that he wants to read, and I know that it isn’t what I want him to read. So I imagine it’ll go something like this: I’ll talk to him about doing honest research and keeping an open mind, learning to recognize biased sources and twisted logic and all that. He’ll realize he has two choices: to write a paper I want to read, or write a paper I’ll give him an F on, and then he gets to take this class again next quarter. (Remind me who teaches this class? Oh, right. Me.) If he’s lucky, he might open his mind and write an honest, thoughtful paper reexamining and reassessing his beliefs. I just need to figure out how to tweak the circumstances in order to have the best chance at arriving at that “lucky” result. But how?
And now, with due respect to O. Henry, I offer my twist:
This is precisely what sucks about being an adjunct. If I were teaching on a campus and had connections and colleagues to consult about this kind of thing, or if I’d heard about how others deal with it in staff meetings with other instructors in the same boat or at professional conferences or in the literature available to me as a result of my being a real member of the faculty, I would be far better prepared to deal with it. But I’m an adjunct. I have no office (for my job teaching at the Pen, anyway), no colleagues (other than the people I walk into and out of the building with), no funding for attending conferences or subscribing to journals about this. I should research it on my own time, but I teach fucking writing classes and there is no such thing as “my own time.”
America, this is our education system. And providing an education to incarcerated students is one of the few things actually likely to reduce their chances of recidivism (thus saving taxpayer dollars by preventing them from going back to prison…you’re welcome). Our education system and our capitalist system mean that adjuncts like me are hired because we are cheap labor: crap wages, no benefits. And we are insufficiently equipped and supported for situations like this. If I don’t do well in the case of this student, I suspect I could end up having a huge negative effect on this guy’s life — not to mention his recidivism chances.
I bet there are adjuncts out there who would actually know what to do in this situation, either because they’ve handled it or because they’ve studied it. I haven’t handled a situation as bold as this, and I certainly didn’t do my M.A. on “How to Teach Racists They’re Wrong.” I did study enough about race relations to know that this is an insidious, illogical brain problem, and as we see daily in American politics, rational thought, facts, and information rarely touch people whose minds are so closed. So I know the basics. But this is by far the most challenging situation I’ve found myself in: because it’s racism, it’s the penitentiary, it’s something that I know to my very core is wrong and he believes, probably to his very core, is right.
Yet that’s my job. I’m going to do it. I just wish I knew how to do it best.
Tonight in my penitentiary class we were talking about audience. I stumbled verbally trying to decide whether to call readers of the magazine Ebony “black” or “African-American.”
“It’s okay, you can say it,” one of the white students said. There’s no hiding in this class.
“Well, what do you prefer?” I asked the black student whose audience was in question. “Black or African-American?”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “Only old people care about that stuff.”
This led us into the rabbithole of rhetoric and political correctness, and eventually one white student wondered why there is a black caucus and a Hispanic caucus (there is?) but no white caucus in Congress. “Like, why can’t we have white people pride?” he asked.
I’m sure I have complained in the past about students wondering why there’s no “white people history month,” etc., but at times like this class discussion tonight, I remember that this question presents itself anew to each student, each person, each generation. And as the Trayvon Martin case has shown, Americans are very bad at talking about race. Just, awful. Horrible. So it is, but shouldn’t be, a surprise to those of us who have these difficult conversations that they arise with each new batch of students. (You’d think that would keep me from fumbling and bumbling my way through it by this point; alas.)
Student: Well, I like rap, but I don’t know how to write a research paper about rap.
Me: You know, I once had a student write a really good paper about Tupac and…
Student: It’s “too-pock.”
Me: Not “two-pack”? Like…six-pack?
Student: No.
Me: Oh. Sorry, I’m just really white.
Student: That’s okay.
Me: …Anyway, you said you’re also interested in Seattle, and music, so why not write about the grunge movement? It started in Seattle.
Student: What’s grunge?
Occasionally a writing assignment comes to me and it is SO GREAT OMG I LOVE IT and then I wonder how, exactly, I’m going to justify it in an ENGLISH class. Especially when my lighting bolt is about politics, and I do not teach political science, or American studies, or anything of that ilk. But English isn’t a bad place to bring those ideas in, since their ideologic complexity and the expression of it is essentially what we do in composition.
The main idea
So here’s the idea I had today. After I put enough thought into the class in order to devise a pedagogical justification for it, I would divide the class into two, or maybe three if we’re feeling generous, political parties and ask students in each group to collaboratively come up with a figure they would like to see elected president. What positions, issues, background, education, experience, etc. would they want to see in their elected official?
But where it gets interesting would be to ask them to weigh idealism with pragmatism: what do they wish to see, but what would they be willing to accommodate — or, heaven forbid, actually compromise on — in order for the candidate to be electable?
Collaboration
I think the collaborative part of this assignment is the best part because students will have to grapple with the way idealism and cynicism collide when it comes to politics, and to me that is one of the toughest things to figure out: what is sacred, what is necessary, what is effective — and what isn’t. Groups, to me, are the best place to tussle with these issues because there is real dialogue, as opposed to what you often see and read.
Even better, students would have to dig deeply into issues that we encounter every day, but there’d be little room — if devised correctly — for them to keep to shallow preconceptions. Especially in a group. At the very least, they’d have to consider candidates’ stances on abortion, immigration, the environment, energy, entitlements, defense spending, education, crime, poverty, jobs — I could go on.
Breaking it down
I suppose that if I did this assignment over a quarter, there would be three main writing assignments. First, students could do early, individual papers on those issues mentioned above that they in turn share with the group at large as it collaborates on creating its ideal candidate. Students would need to be well informed on the issues in order to decide how to position their candidate, so if each student (approx. 13 students per group, so 13 issues covered) researches and writes a paper laying out the national conversation on, say, abortion, and presents the various sides of the debate, the group could use that paper — and each of the 13 papers — to become better informed as they make their choices.
The second assignment would be the collaborative, and hopefully creative and multimodal, presentation of their ideal candidate. Would they have a man or woman, old or young, conservative or liberal; would the candidate be a member of a minority group; what experience, background, and qualifications would help this candidate succeed; and most of all, what positions would this candidate take, and what positions would s/he be willing to compromise on in order to be elected? Students could actually create a candidate (like a doll, or an image), and would turn in a collaborative paper and/or portfolio laying out the stances on important issues this candidate takes. Perhaps a student in the group could even play the role of the candidate and give a speech in class. Students could design campaign ads and bumper stickers (using rhetorical moves learned in class) to include in the portfolio….
One of the troubles with this assignment is that students may disagree with the group in terms of what stance they believe their candidate should take. For example, a student may be ardently anti-abortion and have qualms over collaborating in a group with a pro-choice candidate. This final writing assignment is where the student reflects on the process whereby the group arrived at its candidate, and, if s/he felt it necessary, explain his/her position(s) that deviate(s) from the group. I would probably also have students talk about what they learned about rhetoric and persuasion. It is not my mission indoctrinate my students into my political beliefs; it is my mission to have students carefully consider issues and write about them thoughtfully. And there is no field better suited to the study of rhetoric than politics.
Optional activities and assignments:
- Political debate between the two (or three) candidates
- Class (or wider) election
- Research opportunities including surveys and focus groups
- Students could make new parties rather than keeping the traditional Democrat/Republican model
Constraints
Here are my current constraints, and there are many more I haven’t even had time to consider:
- I will teach ENGL 122, which is essentially argumentation. …This curriculum seems well suited toward argumentation, actually — I kept thinking of obstacles but they seem surmountable. But is it fair to ask all my students — a couple of whom are not even U.S. citizens — to spend all quarter on a political theme? Especially in a world already supersaturated with campaigns — although isn’t understanding that world part of what an education is about? Plus the inclusion of rhetorical analysis is well suited to political rhetoric….
- I also teach similar classes in a penitentiary where my students’ do not currently have (and for some, will never have) the right to vote, so this curriculum would be useless there.
- The amount of time the collaborative part of this project would take seems prohibitive. I could easily see two or three weeks of the quarter disappearing down a rabbit hole while students self-democratize to get the collaborative part done. We might need an online (or Google Docs) forum for students to collaborate in their own time.
- Honestly, are traditionally aged college freshman going to be interested enough to keep up a full head of steam on this project for an entire quarter?
I would love some feedback on this idea. My apologies for having just sort of shat it out over the page — today is the first time I’ve considered it and I’m sure what I’ve written is incomplete and, in some cases, misguided. So, thoughts?
This Slate article on children sharing caught my attention because I have been annoyed at the parental hypervigilance and — dare I say — interference in children’s interactions with each other. You know, a parent swooping in and demanding that little Bobby share the Play-Dough with little Susie, who sidled over and grabbed it from Bobby’s hands. Of course until now, sharing hasn’t been an issue in this house, as only yesterday my kid was able to actually let go of the block he put into my hand, so my opinions are far more theoretical at this point. But the article brings up important questions: at what point do we step in to help our children learn to share, and at what point do we sit back and let them figure it out? Where is the balance between being polite and being interfering with it comes to other people’s kids? What age is modeling going to work, and what do we/I do until then?
I surely don’t know, but I guess I use this as a warning shot, of sorts, that I am more likely to sit back and let my child figure things out for himself amongst his peers. Obviously I would step in to prevent injury or to deescalate a bad fight, but I like the idea of kids experiencing gain and loss, of struggling to understand their own power. But you know what? This view of parenting may make my child incompatible with other kids (or, more likely, it may make me incompatible with their parents). He may be seen as a bully or a jerk and I might be seen as a Bad Parent if I take this tack. But I strongly believe that we learn better through experience, not verbal remonstration. Teaching when they’re ripe for it, not green, as the article discusses.
It’s going to be like trying to find firm footing in a marsh, this theory of letting my kid understand power via experience. I suppose the best thing that I can do is ask other parents, Do you want me to step in, or can we let them figure this out? But parents I see on the playground are so quick to jump in before other parents, almost as if they’re competing to see who can be Most Involved, as if that makes them a better parent, so I can’t imagine they will respond well to my approach. And I certainly don’t argue the opposite, that neglect produces “better” or more creative children. I just want to find that middle, somewhat squishy ground where my kid can develop his understanding of power naturally, operate within the parameters of a semi-polite society, but where we his parents serve as guides, not dictators or interventionists. That balance just seems incredibly tricky, if not impossible, to find.
I know this blog isn’t a hotbed for discussion, but I would welcome thoughts and experience on this topic, as it’s one I’m just beginning to contemplate.
A student wrote the following in his writing portfolio cover letter:
Dear Ms. Waters,
To be perfectly honest, when this quarter first started, I thought that English Composition 101 was going to be a breeze. I expected ABC-style, elementary writing where I would be able to knock papers out in twenty minutes or less, like a pizza joint. This class was supposed to be my easy “A.” Boy was I wrong.
The first paper I turned in was the 5-paragraph essay on the novella, “A River Runs Through It.” Assuming I was a great writer, I had a smug attitude and was looking forward to my first “A” of the quarter. When the paper was returned, however, I was greeted by a smack in the face: a “C”! Surely this must be some kind of mistake, I thought. Upon reviewing the notes and comments, I was dismayed to discover that I was not as great of a writer as I initially believed, and was, in fact, heavily flawed. I didn’t know how to properly cite sources, I was unclear in my arguments, and I was not summarizing in my own words. Worst of all, I was the next worse [sic] thing to being a plagiarizer.
[...talks about assignments he worked on and how his grade improved]
Writing is something that many people don’t understand how to do well. While the concept of explaining something in the written word seems so simple, to actually do it is something else entirely. The lessons that I have been taught in English Composition 101 are ones I will always remember. They have given me the confidence to write thoughtfully and intellectually on just about any subject. Grist for my mill, I suppose you could say [reference to G. Graff article "Hidden Intellectualism"]. In the future, I plan to use this knowledge to produce academically sound papers for my other classes and hopefully pursue a post-graduate degree once I get out of Washington State Penitentiary.
I would like to thank you, Ms. Waters, for taking the time to come to this environment and bringing higher learning into our lives. The lessons that you have taught me have inspired in me a confidence in my academic ability that I didn’t have before I took this class. I hope that you take at least a little satisfaction in knowing that you have helped a student begin his journey towards something better in his life. Wherever you end up going with your teaching career, you will always have students out there that will remain forever grateful for having been better educated by your lessons.
Sincerely yours,
[...]
I don’t post this to pat myself on the back; instead, I post it to remind myself, and I hope others, of the very high highs that come with this career.
And I’ll just add a sentence from another of his papers, which was pretty much the best line in a student paper, ever. The context is, again, Gerald Graff’s article “Hidden Intellectualism,” wherein Graff argues that students should tackle texts that are interesting to them, and that they can exercise the same rhetorical muscle with contemporary, popular texts as they can with traditional, canonical texts. This student’s response:
Sorry Shakespeare, but thou doth not standeth a chance against cars, music, friends, or girls, in any particular order, on any given day.
Yesterday I came across an online discussion about episiotomies,* one that culminated in me spending precious football time researching peer-reviewed journal articles about the procedure’s necessity and efficacy. This rabbit-holed into reviewing methods of natural labor induction and labor positions and techniques; by the end of the evening, I’d probably spent a good few hours on Academic Search Premier, something I wouldn’t've dreamed of doing back when I took research writing. It’s also something I wouldn’t've dreamed of doing when there’s football to be watched, but yesterday’s games roundly sucked and, well, it was actually kind of fun to learn stuff.
Anyway, when I returned to the forum to see how the episiotomy discussion had progressed, I discovered that these particular pregnant women were far more interested in the bandwagon approach to pregnancy decisions, and an immoderate number of women voiced their decision to avoid an episiotomy “at all costs” because they’d “heard it’s easier to heal if you tear naturally.”
Yeah, well, I hear that ninety percent of bad decisions are based on hearsay.
I don’t say this because episiotomies are a good idea; I just think having a categorical refusal to have one is ignorant (have you read about anal fissures**? NOT FUN), and I’m kind of alarmed at how these women made healthcare decisions — based on not evidence, but on what they’ve heard. Perhaps a great deal of the blame falls on the medical community for not educating patients as to evidence-based medicine (and, in some cases, not performing evidence-based medicine), but as patients I think we need to step up and educate ourselves. And by that I don’t mean the first Google search result or polling other pregnant women in an online forum.
* I assume I lost nearly half my potential readers at this point; oops.
** And I probably lost the other half here.
I’d be done with these papers if it weren’t for constantly needing to get up and (1) pee and (2) BANG MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL, OH MY GOD.
Seriously: how can you be so articulate about what we talk about in class and then NOT APPLY IT TO YOUR PAPER?
*
I have just given a paper 27%, an all-time low not counting plagiarism. The paper before that got a 90%. WTF, people.
Fucking dilatation. I hate being wrong.
It’s a bit hard for me as a teacher to sit as a student in a class. It’s kind of like rafting after I learned to row: no way am I not going to be the one in charge of where the boat is going and what rocks and waves it’s going to hit.
I may, come to think of it, have a bit of a control issue.
Anyway, this is relevant because in last night’s childbirth education class, I found myself mentally critiquing the educator, which of course is ridiculously hypocritical since it’s not like I’m the most fabulous teacher to spin the magic web of rhetoric. But seriously, I give you the following situations:
1. To start with, she made a sexist generalization at the beginning of class, something about how women’s labor stories are like men’s fish stories (implying something about lying about the length thereof, I guess), and mostly I was offended because I fish, too. And I have not yet lied about my labor experience (head’s up: I WILL win), so the expectation rankled.
2. Then there was this dandy question, clearly meant to gin up some discussion in the class:
Educator: How do you time contractions?
[ten seconds dead silence]
Me: Um, with a watch?
I knew what she was getting at, although not exactly — something to do with frequency and/or duration of contractions — but when you ask an unclear question and no one answers, rephrase and clarify what you mean. Or else you get smart-asses like me answering. (Though, professional confessional time: I love smart-asses. They make class fun and keep me on my toes. Double bonus. Although I’m not sure this educator feels that way about me.)
3. This is a rhetorical complaint: Everything she says is declarative: You WILL do this, you WILL do that, you WILL like this, you WILL not like that, etc. Um, no, thank you. Being told what I will and won’t do or think works about as well on this 30-year-old as it did on this 15-year-old. I realize I’m knocking my own maturity level here, but thanks to feminism and consumerism AND SCIENCE, women have a lot more childbirth choices than we used to, and I don’t appreciate childbirth “education” being presented as a map with stations where you get your hand stamped before moving on to the next level. If that works for the next woman, great — but not me.
Tangential confession: Last night I was a little taken aback when the educator asked who all was reading books on childbirth and I was the only one who raised a hand. Seriously?! How can you approach one of the biggest events in your life without planning? (And no, I don’t think childbirth education indoctrination counts.) I mean, I know I like to plan, but … HOW DO YOU NOT PLAN?
4. Finally, this childbirth educator pronounces the word “dilated” “dillatated.” THAT IS NOT A WORD, and I know because I triple-checked it on dictionary.com so as to not be made an ass of (which happens often enough as it is). And I know I should be more worried about what it means to be 10 cm “dillatated” than how she mispronounces the word, but it strikes at the heart of her ethos and those twelve or whatever years she spent on a Labor and Delivery ward.
Ugh. Somehow in my life I have morphed from the back-row, I’m-not-here student into the front-row, know-it-all critic. What’s worse, I remember how I hated those people in college, and thus this post is halfway between a cry for help and a blubbering confession. I guess when I’m stuck spreadlegged and naked at 8 cm dillatated and wondering why my epidural isn’t working, I’ll have time to ponder this further.
Apparently the best way to make your students misbehave is to brag about them to the Internets. I wonder if the reverse is true.
You see, one assignment is to watch a documentary and then to analyze its rhetoric in a paper. The students voted on the documentary they’d most like to see, and although “Super High Me” came in first, it was rated R which is generally not approvable, plus my research into it didn’t seem like it would present an argument per se, so we went with the runner-up, An Inconvenient Truth. To be clear, while it wasn’t their first choice, it was still their choice.
Oh. my. gawd.
Such wailing and gnashing of teeth — you’d think Al Gore personally done them all wrong what with all the whining and death wishes directed his way. And what kills me is how this film – that they voted to see — is so irrelevent that they see the idea of human-caused climate change as boring, yet they all want to see 2012. Um, guys? Srsly?
On Wednesday we’re going to talk about ad hominem logical fallacies and evaluating an argument, not a person. In the meantime, I wish aspirin were good for fetuses (feta? fetii?). Or alcohol.
I seriously don’t understand how we can go over summary, quotation, and paraphrase for HOURS and students still don’t use quotation marks for words taken from another source “because it’s paraphrase.”
NO IT’S NOT. The SOURCE may have paraphrased, but YOU did NOT.
*tearing out my hair*
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Update: Have fixed typo in title. Now am considering live-blogging Meltdown to Baldness 2010. Ugh.
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Those faint screams are the sounds of me checking my students’ sourcework.
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I must speak a different language when I teach. It’s the only explanation for a couple of these research papers.
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It’s really only three out of twelve papers (and two of those weren’t my students in ENGL 101) that are so awful, but they’re THAT AWFUL. (And this is one benefit of teaching at the pen: my students will never know I liveblogged my hairloss.)
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I think the key here is to not read all the good papers first. Stupid, stupid planning.
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Remember copyediting? That was a nice, stress-free career with regular hours….
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The delusions are getting stronger.
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