Ranting, Semi-Ranting, and some Meditating, Ignore Me if You Please

Teaching is an undeniable position of power. Why else would this country, among others, be cracking down so hard on the goings-on of the classroom? Why else would governmental and parental regulations of the classroom and a No-Child-Left-Behind(-Should-Get-Funding) type programming be proliferating? Why push all these tests of knowledge, tests of teacher adequacy, mandated curriculums and mandated formats and mandated everything like nation-crack boiled on the spoons we feed our learners?

Hello, my name is Me
Before I begin, I want to lay out my spartan credentials, the where’s of my background. Why? Afterall, this is my blog, and my semi-rant, and why would I need to be all pompous and say, hey, look at where I’ve been? Well, truthfully I feel like I get up on my high horse too frequently and thrash my arms around without sufficiently stating that “I’m still learning too.” But I also know that I have a base of knowledge, and I appreciate that base and feel somewhat confident - vulnerable, but confidant – in what I do and don’t know about teaching. So, even while blog-pulpitizing, shouldn’t I put everything out there just for the kicks and cracks and ballyhoo? Yes, I have a reason for this.

So… my informal credentials include a love for students, a love for the possibilities that learning and teaching and the mixture that those states of being offer, and a passion for writing and communication in a world with so much miscommunication and eased-along silence.

My formal credentials include only an MA in English, one pedagogy class, and three years of teaching writing. Some details:

My first two years of teaching were as a TA in charge of one classroom per quarter of Freshman Composition. The first year of teaching, the first quarter in particular, was spent under the guidance of a fabulous diehard Director, who pushed us to experiment, learn the theory, and constantly put ourselves on the line for the real cause (students). What this generated was an odd assortment of TA’s working near 60-hours during one quarter to learn, process and help each other through the hell that teaching can be. We constantly got together and talked about writing, griped about student papers and how hard it was to grade, and commiserated on the pains of standing with great insecurity in front of twenty-four students primed to ignore us and hate writing, and try to help them move words on paper. I learned ten thousand worlds that first quarter, and most importantly, I learned that teaching should be a collaborative effort if we are to remain honest, creative, and humble with the power given us.

The second year of TA-ing involved much more experimentation, including experimentation in alienating myself from the students and behaving like a bad teacher and not caring as much as I used to. Fortunately, it also included going to teaching conferences and giving a presentation on technology in the comp classroom (I focused on audience awareness and how to utilize mixed media to help students understand the rhetorical interactions they are establishing with an imagined group of people that is hopefully much wider than just their teacher).

The third year of teaching involved a shift to a community college, where I taught two classes for two quarters. I taught Principles of Writing for the first time, which is a bridge course into college writing, and involved far more basic writing than I had seen before. I learned quickly that the very basicness of this writing is a result of several factors, among them:

1. Very poor reading comprehension. I learned to slow down in the amount of reading I gave and take more time explaining active reading. Very few people are college literate, and this realization startled the dickens out of me.

2. Nervousness. Principles tended to gather a group of students who had: shitty assessments of their writing/intellectual capabilities from previous teachers ; other languages as their primarily discourse; complicated pasts and presents that messed with their ability to concentrate on the esoterics of classroom learning; or difficulty giving too much of a crap about writing except as a means to an end.

3. Previous education: which taught many of them that language is a basic formalized shell into which they have to shove a simplistic idea. The great and grand example of this is the 5-paragraph essay, which involves broad intro, broad thesis, broad and boringly repetitive examples to support the broad thesis, and broad conclusion that repeats the broad beginning. Ug.

In other words, I started learning more clearly what I was up against, and how many of these challenges are part of the political, cultural, and in particular, class issues of our current situation in America.

Simply/simplisticly put, students from middle-class white American families tend to have their grammar down. They have not, however, been taught to think too hard about things. The higher the students are on the social totem pole, the more their education seems to have pointed them towards critical thinking and formalized analysis, which to me, translates into giving rhetorical power to the students whose families have the political power. Bad news, in other words.

The good news is that although the students below middle class did not always demonstrate solid grammar, they more frequently* demonstrated an awareness of their tenuous position in the world, which meant that they were far more ready to fight fight fight at all costs, for whatever it was that they felt like fighting for. Sometimes this was for learning and language, and sometimes it was for ignorance and rejection. This means that while primed to perceive writing as torturous grammatical puzzle that they were doomed to fail at, they were also ready to perceive communication as something with real and true import. If, as a teacher, you want your students to take up the task of speaking their voices and changing the world, this is far more important than correct grammar.

*This little asterisk was a little note to self to temper above statement. Many of the lower class students were in this position (being aware), but many had instead succumbed to religious and/or cultural manipulation and instead of being aware of their own position, were instead more than willing to spout cliché’s taken right off the Bush campaign stickers. I want to instantly defend myself here as being open to conservative perspectives as potentially more complex than Sheer Evil – to not place myself as a liberal teacher trying to sway politics within the classroom – but I cannot deny that I saw many writing patterns that left bare the political nature of learning: unwillingness to engage alternate perspectives via analysis or critical thinking was very often connected to traditional or patriotic values, and I’m not going to back down from that observation.

Anyhow, back to my background. The time at the community college also left me intrigued by college politics. I.e. Interesting just how poorly paid most of the adjuncts are (most have at least one other job), interesting just how many adjuncts there are, and interesting how unwilling the government is to support more full time positions for college teachers. Why interesting? Well, we were all spending so much time scurrying around that there was very little time left over for us to get together and keep each other honest, creative and humble in our learning practices.

Interesting. Power at the community college level strikes me as extremely random – you win some, you lose some, and few of the teachers have sufficient time to communicate with each other about pedagogies that encourage inequalities or little critical awareness.

After two quarter of this, I went down to Ecuador, where I was paid less, taught more, and learned much. Down there I taught three classes for two quarters, and broadened my teaching out into the following classes: English Structure & Grammar, and Citation Practices.

Ah yes, grammar. In other words, I had to learn far more than I really wanted to learn, but it ended up being really good for me, because I got over my fear of grammar and learned how to set up some basic learning procedures, which I will talk about below. I also learned about teaching English in a foreign country, which carried even stronger feelings of conflict for someone like myself, who wants other countries to succeed, of course, but who also feels sad to see a country morph its younger generations into English-speaking business-gurus. The purpose of language down in Ecuador was far more utilitarian than anything I had taught before; it was less about critical thinking and more about business, and that was that.

Anyhow, I want to get on to my current thoughts and observations, the reason why I am writing this right now, posting on this bloggity with little hope of it meaning anything, but why I needed to get this out there.

Rant: Power the Art Institute Way?
Here I am at an art school – once again acting out the role of a graduate student. I feel very odd shifting back into the role of student, away from the role of teacher, which is a huge part of how I have constructed my identity for what feels like a long time now. Most of the time, I think of myself as a teacher taking a break. I miss teaching, but I recognize that the “teacher” part of me did not just leave because I am not practicing it right now. It’s also got me thinking about why I feel strange about not teaching, and has lead me to realize that teaching is power.

And I feel like I have much, much less of that power right now. But here’s where we get to the frustration. Teaching – power – is the ability to effect the way human beings are looking at the world, theorizing about the world, seeing themselves in the world, and very very importantly (just look at our Government horror right now), communicating about the world. I once had a grad school teacher who told us, his students, that “if you think teaching is a political action, you are fooling yourself. Going on a march, joining the government, feeding people, etc… these are political actions. What you can do in the classroom is far less than you’ll ever believe.” But I reserve the right to disagree. Arming students – all students, regardless of political background, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, asshole-qualities, etc – with the power to look through language, and to utilize language, is the most political act that I’m capable of.

And so, now I feel like I’m not doing too much to help the world out here. Frustration.

However, I am now working in a Tutoring Center, which is making my mind explode explode with new thoughts.

Did I mention that I’m at an art school now? All of you who read this blog probably already know that.

One of the thing is, this school uses a credit-noncredit system. I initially saw this a miraculous wonder: teaching without the restraints of judgment. Wowsers, I thought of that as a chance to focus on what learning really is about: moving thought and knowledge and tools from generation to generation and back again. Discussing, allowing students the space to grow as they choose while utilizing knowledgeable guidance to ease that process along.

However, working in the Tutoring Center, I am seeing a different side of this. Most of the students I interact with are international students, and usually they come in because they are scared or lost or – and this is what really gets me – have been threatened with failure by their teachers. What I’m wondering right now: is the whole credit/noncredit thing allowing less discernment in process while promoting a black/white perception of the world – either you fail or you don’t fail, either you meet my demands or you don’t meet my demands? I thought a no-grade system would allow teachers to focus on process, rather than encourage temporary achievement, but it seems through my interactions with the students who come to me, that this process does not always find its way into the students' experience of themselves as learners at the Art Institute – at least with writing at the undergraduate level.

Interesting that it is the international students who bear the brunt of this. I’ve seen quite a bit of “you come to this school, this country, you should know the language” posturing, and maybe a little bit of it’s opposite: “you’re here to learn art, not so much communication.” I’m sorry, but both of these positions leave out the needs of the students. They are here, paying an extraordinary amount of money, and they happen to be a large part of the Art Institute’s financial base, but far too often they are not learning what they need to learn in terms of communicating.

They do not need to learn English because they are here, in our world, and have a moral necessity, but they do need to learn writing because it is in their interest to be able to communicate about art, their identity, and their perceptions. They need to be able to succeed in business, and to communicate with themselves and others their reasons for being here. They do not need to learn writing to pass/fail a class, but rather to learn what is within the class.

Why is it then that yesterday I saw more than one of my returning tutees with the following-type comments on their papers: “Grammar, grammar, grammar! Go to the tutoring center and get help! This paper, if you turned it in for a final grade, is a failing paper!” ????

Grammar, grammar, grammar? Who are they kidding? The papers have grammar errors, but that’s the way it’s going to be unless the students start plagiarizing, which already is a problem.

The disheartening part for me is that when I look at the papers, I’m not seeing as much grammatical error as the teachers seem to be seeing. Instead, I’m seeing inchoate ideas, stabs at analysis, attempts to integrate sources, and developing details that rarely leave the realm of abstracted confusion. But this is a starting point, and not a reason to scare young students with the assessment of “failure.” There comes a point when grammar becomes more of a teaching excuse than a teaching moment.

And who is punished for this? The students who are learning. The students who are taking risks. The students who have uprooted themselves to a place millions of miles away from safety. The students who are stuck in the mire of language acquisition, which is an incredibly difficult process that takes time, reading, and much writing. The students coming from poorer backgrounds who have much to say if they could just learn how to say it, and much to learn if they are going to help the world with their presence.

Interesting that a school full of progressive art-oriented folks who are pressing towards a postmodern pluralism and re-capturing of agency, among other visions, seems to have a regressive, highly traditional model of approaching writing, which promotes uniformity rather than experimentation and multiplicity. Is this just me?

I Backpedal: Why Teaching or TA-ing is Hard
And yet, I identify with many of these teachers or ta’s. What kind of time do they have? Should a 200-level art history teacher be responsible for mucking their way through an almost unreadable paper?

I have spent hours ranting and raving about papers. Worse than that, I have spent hours working on trying to understand a single paper, only to find myself completely exhausted and all out of coffee.

While teaching at community college, I had to establish the following rule for myself: don’t put more time into a paper than the student has put into it herself.

The problem is, as teachers and readers, we are fundamentally incapable of knowing exactly how much time and effort the student has invested, even though sometimes it looks obvious. We are also incapable of seeing exactly where the student went askew in their thinking. All this aside, it is very very hard sometimes to understand exactly what is going on in a paper, what patterns are forming, and what we should tackle in our limited time with a student.

And I’m sorry, but sending a student to the Tutoring Center is a start, but a limited start. There’s only so much tutors can do, and if we are constantly racking students over the grill with their grammar (in endeavor to get them up to their teacher’s pass standards), we are once again falling into the gully-rut of teaching students that writing is about form, and form alone.

For the majority, form is unbearably boring without content.

To go back to backpedaling: Teachers are also underpaid, underappreciated, undersupported, and overtaxxed with the power that is thrown at them. They don’t have enough time in the day, and for every paper that takes forty minutes to read instead of twenty minutes, they have just taken on twice the burden than they might have wanted to take on. In this world, grammar and form streamlines their day and makes things barely manageable, rather than “easy.”

Solutions?
Questions I have:

1. Are there enough forums for communication between teachers about how to deal with the teaching issues that come from being an institute with a high proportion of non-native speakers?

2. Are the teachers being asked to learn pedagogy as well as art?

3. Are the TA’s in the intro writing classes getting the training, support, and funding they need to be able to support the student’s learning process?

4. Is it a lack of funding that results in the inability to provide the support necessary?

These are not rhetorical questions on my part. I really don’t know the answers, partially because I have not been here for long enough, and partially because some communication lines seem shut down. But they are nonetheless questions that I have asked myself while working with students who are upset by the comments, or lack of comments, on their papers.

Solutions I have:

1. Open discussion of above questions
2. Administrative willingness to address above questions

As a baseline, students should not be able to move through their ESL or Writing Classes only to end up in a quagmire when they are in higher-level classes, or are ready to submit applications to grad school or jobs. Nor should they be threatened with failure because of grammar issues when their critical thinking and ability to tackle a project needs more attention.

Thoughts: 5 Things I Wish some Teachers at this School Knew about Writing

1. Grammar is important, but not in the way many people think it is.
Not teaching grammar, or noting grammar error in a student’s paper is much like refusing to describe the landscape to a foreigner asking for direction. It’s a limit on how accessible the world can become for others who do not have the knowledge that the insiders do.

Maybe there’s some sort of profound disheartenment we, the liberal intellectuals, might feel at always teaching English to all these other countries and immigrants when the vast majority of Americans know no other foreign language at all, and have hardly even lifted a finger to learn what language-acquisition actually entails for a human being (it’s hard). But nonetheless, we cannot stop teaching at our whim because we find accents charming, or grammar stifling, or vocabulary superficially incorporated. This is not our choice to make, but the choice of those who do or do not want to learn what we have to teach.

However, the biggest confusion about grammar seems to me to be seeing it as “an ends to a means,” rather than a “means to an end.”

I used to think: gone, hopefully, are the days when we stand on the top of a pulpit with a translated book of stories and learnings in hand in order to lambaste the creatures of error with the idea that they are doomed to the pit of hell. Gone are the days of hanging on a thread over the pits of an inferno and looking down into the belching lava mire below us and thinking, “bad me, very very bad me.”

However, I’m starting to wonder if people perceive grammar like it is something that flew down from the sky on the tip of a lightening rod and smote the air acrid with the threat of sizzling lexical damnation.

Um, no.

Grammar is a system. For all those writing folks who (like myself) sometimes stand on the top of our couches, waving student papers or the New York Times + grammar error: think back to the last time you worked with math. Considering the amount of English-student backpedaling I see with the idea of sciences and mathematics, I think it might be surprising to point out that language, while certainly not equivalent to, is a form of mathematics. It is a system that constructs patterns and relations and deductions and additions and complex algorithmic approximations to… abstractions. Abstractions of our world. Grammar helps language by allowing us to construct equations that initially make sense, and then to deconstruct or play with the imaginary or add 7 to 66 to 667 to 7776 to 777777 to whatever smooth articulating dance we wish to create. Grammar is not unlike: +, -, ( ), ó.

Since grammar is a semi-mathematical system, grammatical error is likewise composed of pattern. Discerning the pattern is far more important than noting that the results of the formula are skewed. Mistakes come from proofreading, and are notable simply for their lack of pattern. Mistakes are a big “whoopsy do,” whereas errors (pattern) mark out the limits of an individual’s mathematical knowledge. As teachers, if we are confused by someone’s paper, it is our job to analyze the paper and note pattern. So:

1. 3 specific comments (pattern of preposition error!) is better than 5 general comments (grammar!).

2. 1 specific comment + examples and explanation (pattern of preposition error! Prepositions are “At, In, Out, About…,” etcetera. You most frequently mix up your prepositions at the beginning of a sentence. Here is an example:…!) is better than 3 specific comments.

Doing this allows the student to begin noticing their patterns in order to systematically change their process of writing. If you note mistake instead of error, the student is left with no means of approaching writing, only a means of following up on other people’s comments.

Also, by focusing narrowly on grammar, you let students know that it is the thinking that matters, and when they get their form down, their thinking becomes clear for their readers. That is, after all, more the point of writing than form alone is.

2. If it looks like the student is BS-ing, maybe they are. But maybe they just don’t know how to use the elements of thought… on paper.
In brief, all writing is composed of two basic elements:

1. information / facts / experience / history / data / stories / etc.

2. theories about how #1 function: explanation / analysis / implications / quotes from other theorists / etc.

Putting these two basic elements together in paper format is very, very hard. Very, very hard at each and every level of writing.

Genres and forms put these elements together differently. For example: A report uses #1 almost entirely and utilizes form to establish a minimum of #2. A philosophical treatise uses #2 almost entirely and utilizes #1 when they don’t want their audience to pee their pants in fear of their brilliant #2’s. Essays are the most difficult in some ways because they use a balance of #1/#2 in ways that vary and are put together in multitudes of dimensions depending on the topic.

In general, analytical essays and/or personal essays start very heavy with #1 and move to discussion of #2 and then tend to end with an emphasis of #2, particularly implications.

As previously noted, but worthy of repetition, this is very hard to do. As a result, you will frequently see students either doing what we like to call “bs-ing,” which means over-emphasizing #2 with little attention #1, which results in broad, broad oversimplification or obfuscation. Or, they might do what we call “regurgitating information,” which means over-emphasizing #1 with little attention to #2 and results in an over-abundance of description, facts shoved together, and quotes from other people who know better.

Encouraging students to find and explore that balance is more often a stronger starting point than just thinking the student is trying to blow smoke up your a**. They might be trying to slide something by you, and sometimes it is because they are lazy, but sometimes it’s because they don’t know any better.

3. Writing gets sloppier as the student learns, not less sloppy.
Counter-intuitive, huh? But frequently true. Whenever we experiment, whenever we discard a worn-out form, whenever we take risks, whenever we re-organize… we pass through a state of entropy, and then pull things back inwards slowly. This is a glory of life. And it must be noted: things are at their most fragile when they are at a stage of emergence. Thus, the double meaning of emergency.

Frequently, this is visible in writing. As a teachers of writing, I think folks should be attuned to the ways in which students are venturing. And also attuned to the ways of and reasons for why they might not be.

Whenever I see a disaster-paper, I always ask myself: what is this person trying out that is new, and can I offer suggestions on how to play with it?

Whenever I see a rigidly formal paper with little content, I always ask myself: why is this student scared? What could I use as a carrot to encourage this student out of the shell that hems them in and limits their growth?

It’s important to note that writing is thought and learning, and as a result, will sometimes demonstrate the most amazing potentialities - or amazing weaknesses - of the brain.

4. Writing Should Always Be a Dance, even when it’s serving a utilitarian purpose.
This is just a personal belief, but I’m going to put it out there like it’s an inevitable conclusion. My reasoning for this is that people rarely excel for a long period of time at something they detest. If writing can’t take on some of the joy of play, of self-discovery, and world-discovery, then it’s hardly worth anybody’s time, is it? If you can explain to me why it would, I’ll bake you some cookies, but that would just prove my point, so you have an uphill struggle.

5. Students are much larger and more complex than what we see in classrooms
They don’t have their whole life to give their teachers or classes. What is amazing is that sometimes they give something… that is amazing. Sometimes this takes place in a writing risk, sometimes in a conversation, and sometimes in a little sweet moment: how touching it is to receive a thank-you, or a flower, or a note, or a drawing, or a cd-copy, or a visit from a student… because the learning is about them and for them, and the fact that sometimes they perceive it as something they can give back to, is beautiful. Friggin beautiful.

In plentiful acknowledgement of their givings, shouldn’t we also make room for the students who draw lines in the sand, who decide that they can only learn so much this semester, who can only progress one foot instead of five?

I think I can sometimes feel resentment written on my face when a student gives me a truly crappy work, or doesn’t revise, or ignores what I’ve painstakingly articulated. But that is their choice to make, and I just don’t think I should penalize them for denying me power.

That is, the teacher is in a unique position of power. Part of the humility and ethics of owning such power is giving it up when… well, when necessary, not always when demanded, but when we are faced with the question of our own limitations. I believe that I should never wield my power over the heads of people who need to find their own agency to make it in this world, nor do I acknowledge teachers in my own life who trespass this boundary into the complexity of my own separate and related life. Part of the responsibility of a teacher is handing our power over and saying “this is power for us to share in the world” and scraping up enough faith to believe that they, like you, will struggle to use that power to better the world and open up possibilities for everyone and not just themselves.

Ballyhoo!

Are you a Reader?
If so, here ya go:

Zamel, Vivian and Ruth Spack, ed. Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Straub, Richard. The Practice of Response: Strategies for Commenting on Student Writing. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.

Stephen, Jill and David Rosenwasser. Writing Analytically, 3rd ed. Boston: Thomson Heinle, 2003.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. Penguin, 1990.