Telling the Truth

I've been thinking of using this blog to tell what really goes on at my college: the happy stories are easy, of course -- like the goofy summer-school student who stopped by my office today, pleased to spend an hour chatting because she had two hours "to waste."

She wanted to show me a book she'd checked out of her public library -- "The Gay Rights Movement" -- wondering how she could buy it.  I spent 45 minutes with her, analyzing "The Children's Hour," hearing about her classes, including ear-training and logic (the textbook's cover photograph of trees in mist really confounded her: how is that the image of logic?).

But what about the not-happy things that occur all around me?

• Tech writing students who, asked to talk about "usability," immediately begin sharing horror stories about our college's new website.  
• The faulty registration system that did not screen the students for honors courses; as a result, both students and faculty have been surprised this week to find that what they thought they were signing up for is not what they've received.  
• Faculty and student training sessions led by someone who treats all the participants like children ("If I raise my hand, that means you should stop talking!").  
• Financial aid not distributing vouchers for book purchases until the second week of the semester -- so students cannot begin the reading unless I lend them my personal books (which I continue to do). 

I could write a longer list.  It might be healthy for me to purge in this blog, but I'm not sure . . . should I tell the truth about how much worse the infrastructure has gotten since I arrived 9 years ago?  Many, many things are worse, and part of the reason I think is that our president has hired his pals instead of smart people: young men who are protecting their fragile machismo by treating others badly (especially the women who run the joint).  It's just so classically sexist that it's almost funny.

*Sigh.*

Better Blogging

While I have been taking a break from this julie@century blog this summer, I have been working with another blog with my online tech writing students.

The course ended yesterday, and I have to say that asking students to write and share blog posts has been a *terrific* learning experience for them, the best blogging I've read since I've been using this assignment. Here's how it works:

• I asked them to sign up for Google Alerts to get messages about "Technical Writing" in the news (analogous to the in-class discussion we would have if we were meeting f2f). The news stories show up in their email inboxes, usually 4 or 5 a week.
• I put the instructions for how to set up this alert right in the syllabus -- it's a first example of instructions, which is the second assignment students write for the class. (A syllabus is a piece of technical writing, after all.)
  
• I have created a private blogspot blog for the class, and I add new students to the blog every semester. I keep adding students instead of creating a new blog for each class because I want students to see what others have written over the years -- examples of good and bad blog posts (practicing genre analysis!) help them write their own.
• Students should post eight times in the eight-week semester: 4 times before midterm and 4 times after midterm. Commenting on 3 classmates' posts can substitute for one of their own posts. They can decide when to post, but only one post per day counts. (I used to ask for weekly posts, but students would forget. And one semester, students posted all their posts at once, which defeats the purpose of getting them to think and share.)
• Posts are worth 10 points each -- totaling about 1/10th of the points for the course.
• I don't check spelling, grammar, mechanics -- the only comments I make are about analysis: simply summarizing or copying the news item is not sufficient. Students must post what they *think* about what they've read.

Overall, this semester the students have realized that technical writing is all around them. Some profess to have more respect for technical writers, seeing for the first time all the hard work that goes into creating documents at their workplaces. Here are some example student posts, just as they appeared (weird formatting, spelling errors, and all -- be sure to notice that one Ethiopian student liked a W.B. Yeats quote!):

You can Learn Writing Style- What is Techncial Writing

I received this article in my inbox this morning and thought it would be interesting to read through it since it pertains to what we have learned in our online technical writing class. This article was written by: stevesheriw. he describes technical writing as a way to inform, instruct or persuade, argue within a document. He also goes on to say that what ever you write is some form of technical writing as in resumes, memos, letters, reports, instructions, etc. Some of these forms of technical writing styles were some of our required assignments for this class which made it clear as to why they call it technical writing. Steve also points out that there are 7 steps to consider when writing a document, these steps are; Purpose, audience, content specific to it's purpose and audience, write clearly and precisely, make good use of visuals, and last but not least; be ethical in your writing.

Where have I heard this before, oh yeah, I read about it in the reading assignments and the introduction of our handbook.
http://www.technicalyp.com/?p=372

Top 5 Technical Writing Skills That Pay Big

http://technicalwriting.phoenix-blogs.com/top-5-technical-writing-skills-that-pay-big/

The article goes over the top 5 tech writing jobs that pay big- the reason that I enjoy the article is because over the past semester I have truly payed respect to technical writing. It is a field that will be around forever to meet the needs of people from all types of society. The top 5 payed jobs are as follows:

- Information design

- Information architecture

- Training material development

- Illustration

- Typography

Everyone in the class should appreciate what a vast field technical writing is. It effects everyone (especially college students) in their day to day lives! I have enjoyed the short and challenging semester of technical writing, and I truly believe that it is something that everyone should have a basic understating of. Writing skills are a necessary thing in a society that is based around commercialism.

Technical Writing involves many things that need to be considered before writing a plain draft and Audience analysis is one of them.

This article points out about the kind of audience we need to consider while writing a document. There are 3 main types of audience: a non technical, a semi-technical and a technical. Gender and age also plays a role. As a technical writer we need to focus on the audience’s interest. When considering translation into another language for the document it is even more important to write a simple but clear language to avoid meaning changes. All those information make it clear that it is hard to write a document for multiple audiences. Satisfying all the readers is a hard task.

I liked the statement of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) used in this context: “Think like a wise man but communicate in language of the people” Not only in technical writing gives this success but also in other fields of life.

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/321195_why-keeping-your-audience-in-mind-while-technical-writing-is-important

Student typo

I love this line from today's Technical Writing student discussion post to another student: "I am sure you will do great in technical writhing this summer."

We all might feel like the course is "technical writhing" by the end of the summer! :-)

For Class

The New York Times section called "Vows" has a weekly wedding video. This week, it's a great video of a same-sex couple. Enjoy!

Punctuation

I just found this Salon.com article from 2008: "Is the semicolon girly?"

Hmmm. And of course the implication is that "girly" is undesirable, yeah.

The best line in the article is the last one: "Lynn Harris: Wait. And the period is manly?"

Makes me think of Gloria Steinem's 1978 classic "If Men Could Menstruate."

What motivates us

Check out this video, made from a talk by Dan Pink. (Double click on it to see the whole image.)

What if every organization could embrace these ideas?

Where I work

I work at an institution with one of the worse IT infrastructures I've ever seen. Here's the latest weird thing IT cannot do:

When someone changes her name (for example, by getting married) and needs to update her email address, she will miss out on a lot of communication because of this "fact":

"[T]here is no way for IT to forward e-mails going to my old address to my new address (or to make things come to my old address from my new address)"

So we have an IT department that can't figure out how to forward email.

*Sigh*.

Literature students

1. Reading end-of-the-semester work from my American Women Writers class, I've run into two surprises (more to come, I'm sure):
2. One student copied Sparknotes as her "reading journal," which is supposed to be a piece of writing every week before class to jot down some thoughts about the day's writers.
3. One student wrote this run-on sentence about poetry: "Then with [Audre] Lorde and [Adrienne] Rich it was the whole poetry thing, I just don’t understand it, its not that I don’t like poetry, but I think I like the more popular and classic stuff that’s a lot easier to understand, like Dr. Seuss or Shell Silverstine.”

Popular and classic poets: who knew?

Desperate Slacker

Here's an email response I just received (today, first day of finals week) from a student who has missed eight classes -- four weeks of our semester -- and has said, "If I do not pass this class, I do not graduate":

Dear Professor Daniels,

I wanted to bring to your attention, what I believe to be, a discrepancy in the attendance record you sent me in the last email. Although I was late I did attend class on Feb. 18th, I also participated in the on-line class on March 2nd. I’m going to continue working in hopes to finish this course with a passing grade. I know that you are aware of how critical a passing grade in this course is for me, based on our previous conversation. I truly appreciate the guidance you gave me heading into the conclusion of this semester. I know I should have sought a solution to my issues with the online blog earlier in the semester but if there is anything I can do to find my way to a passing grade so that I could graduate at the end of this semester I would be eternally grateful. If you feel there is no way to make up for my lapses this semester, then I look forward to your additional guidance in our future semester as I retake your course.
Thank you very much for your consideration.

Well, I wonder how s/he thinks s/he is going to "continue working in hopes to finish the course with a passing grade" -- the course is already finished. So it looks like s/he won't graduate, doesn't it?
*Sigh*.

"What I learned"

One of my pedagogical commitments is to ask students to reflect on their own learning -- and to articulate that reflection in writing.

One thing I ask sometimes is for them to write, anonymously, on two sides of an index card:

• 3 things I think everyone in class has learned/achieved this semester
• 3 things that only I learned/saw/achieved

Here's a list of "Only I have learned" from my American lit course:

1. I learned how to perform scansion when reading poetry.
2. I enjoyed doing the facilitation more than I anticipated -- especially the PowerPoint and video [this from a student who researched The Crucible's links to McCarthyism (I recognize his handwriting)]
3. Poetry can take on the most peculiar of forms.

1. how to notice nuances in writing to "see more"
2. the value/need to contextualize a text to really understand it
3. contextualizing research teaches you history and more . . .

1. Poetry is 50% interpretation and 50% research.
2. It is best to facilitate a discussion in an area you love.
3. Reflection after reading is pertinant in order to understand what you've read.

1. how to analyze works based on historical events happening at the time
2. how a short story can actually be a longer story when looked at through different eyes
3. allotting sufficient time to read is important to be able to focus on a piece and truly analyze it
   

1. I learned to stick with it, even when I don't understand the class completely.
2. I learned how to more respectfully disagree or keep quiet.
3. I learned a great deal about minority viewpoints in Am. Lit that were previously foreign to me.

1. American writers are very depressed writing. [this is a Pakistani student]
2. A lot of problems in the author's life forced them to become extraordinary writers.
3. I had lots of fun learning more about American lit.

1. Independent bookstores were a brand new experience for me [they need to visit one in a "field trip" experience]
2. Two lit courses in one semester is a lot of writing & reading.
3. Need to be more proficient Analyzing poetry!

1. To find symbolism & metaphor in writing such as the snake in "Sweat" & "Chrysanthemums" & "The Eyes".
2. That the cannon (sic) of literature will always evolve because of individual talents & new writers.
3. American Literature is unique because it reflects the many cultures that have come together and an endless search for identity & belonging vs. retention of individualism.

1. co-operation
2. tollerance (sic)
3. research skills [this fellow's "everyone learned" list was "co-operation, research skills, speaking skills"]

1. I earned more about the various interpretations of the pieces.
2. I learned more about the work of "The Awakening" through preparing our facilitation.
3. When our guest speaker, Kelvin [Monroe], came in and the facilitation on Jazz I saw the connection of the music of Jazz to Morrison's style of writing

1. Presentations go much better without games.
2. A writing journal really helps put thoughts/ideas in perspective.
3. The same exact piece of literature can be many things to many people.

1. Learned the importance of good exposition & good filler [did this student bullshit on her/his essay??]
2. I've found different reading strategies.
3. The importance of transitioning sentences

1. How to begin to decode poetry.
2. MLA referencing
3. How to tread lightly on fragile egos in group projects.

1. interpret an author's message within their story
2. enjoy an author's story that I normally didn't like
3. to read faster

1. about the author I wrote my paper on
2. feel more confident about future classes

1. more about the beat generation
2. about F. Scott [Fitzgerald]
3. how to better deal w/passive aggressive people [this student incited some heated discussion in class because she had a hard time listening to others]

1. The difference between an Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet and a Shakespearean sonnet
2. How to make a formal presentation
   

1. I never knew anything about Henry Adams
2. I absolutely fell in love with "The Awakening" (and found it inspirational)
3. Appreciate the connection b/t Art, lit., and music.

1. The significance of Black American writers and their contributions to Literature.
2. How/why creative writing is necessary [I don't understand this point as related to our class]

1. Becoming more well read
2. Survived my first college course toward my major!!
3. I've read things I never thought I would

1. That paper grading is very arbitrary [this woman "has gotten As on all my class papers" -- she's really mad at me]
   
2. That Amrican (sic) Lit. is depressing all about abused women.
3. There is a lot of reading

1. To control my fear of failure. [this from a 70-year-old woman]
2. To control or work through anger so I could finish assignments on time.
3. To [she didn't complete her card]
   

Isn't this list amazing? A mixture of heart, heat, and reason; a mishmash of personal attack and personal revelation; a lively data set that reflects relatively accurately the personalities in this class of 27 (not everyone turned in their card). Mostly, this group of students was terrific.

Poetry Everywhere

I just stumbled upon this PBS website, narrated by Garrison Keillor, with clips of poets. I can't believe I didn't know about it before.

Naomi Shihab Nye (my cousins' best friend) amazes, and she's just for starters.

Real Writing

As a teacher of writing, I strive to give all of my students -- in writing courses AND in other courses -- opportunities to improve their writing. I provide extensive feedback on drafts in literature courses and in my WGST courses. But how do I deal with writing like this (the first paragraph of an essay, copied exactly as it was submitted, about how the de Beauvoir phrase "One is not born a woman, one becomes one" plays out in our WGST readings this semester):

• According to the famous book: The Second Sex that was written by Simone de Beauvoir. This famous line was used "One is not born a woman, one becomes one." This quote from my view might be interpret as someone who might be born as a female, but later on in their life. They might change their sexuality to being a male because of the things that they learn and experience in life that maybe being a female does not fit their life style, and they like to fix cars, build houses and carry heavy loads like a man. In other cases in which it is classified as norms in society, a female should stay as a female throughout their whole life from the beginning of their birth throughout their learning in life. They should being happy to represent their sexuality as a female and being the sex as they were born with is the way how it should be. In addition to the quote by Beauvoir, there is many discussion about the process of becoming a woman as reflecting back to the quote once again that "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."

Okay, friends, what do I do with five double-spaced pages that read like this?

This student may or may not have had a composition course. This student may or may not understand the material. This student may or may not have achieved a level of literacy (either in English or his home language) to be able to understand or convey complex ideas in writing.

How can I respond in a way that will teach something about the material (that de Beauvoir is talking about the social processes of culture on the individual) and about how to express one's thoughts in writing?

It seems to me that many, many people think "teaching writing" is easy because it just means "checking grammar." But this student's sentences convey many more issues/problems/challenges than just "bad grammar" (of course that's a problem, too). But that "bad grammar" (or more accurately, "bad syntax") is more like "unclear thinking," perhaps.

If we understand the sentence to be the unit of thought, then this writer's thoughts are scrambled, incomplete, preliminary, immature -- or most precisely "inchoate": "from the Latin inchoatus, the past participle of inchoare to start work on, perhaps from in- + cohum part of a yoke to which the beam of a plow is fitted." I love that idea of the yoke: can I help a student yoke his thoughts to words?

More of the definition: "being only partly in existence or operation: . . . especially : imperfectly formed or formulated." This imprefection certainly comes through, although since writing is "endlessly prefectable," we can't expect perfection.

My point, I guess, is to convey the profound challenges in front of me -- and many of my colleagues -- who "teach writing." We are really heroic and underappreciated: our work is misunderstood. I'd call it "sisyphean" if I were in a bad mood, although I'm not sure what crime we've committed that angered the gods (or even who those gods might be in this all-too-mortally-flawed education system).

(Image from WriteThinking)

Stillness and Movement

Worth watching, listening, reading, resting:

Feeling Blue

It's that time in the semester: students either panicky or missing, rarely meeting deadlines, needing extraordinary questions/prompts/prodding/provoking/shenanigans in order to contribute to a class discussion.

Why? Maybe our semesters are just too long.

Or another possibility: unintentional [?] undermining. Here's what a student told me:

This guy is in my FYC course and wanting to write about the assessment test scores needed to get into various writing courses. He thinks the scores are too high (we just recently had to *lower* our scores to match up with other MnSCU colleges). He's in the dental assisting (or maybe dental hygiene) program and doing fine. "My teacher likes me so I'm getting good grades," he said. [I've typed out his sentence exactly as he said it: note the coordinating conjunction.]

"My teacher doesn't know why I have to get good grades in English -- the scores don't matter for us because writing doesn't matter in our jobs." [These words are almost exact; I'm paraphrasing, but the *teacher* is the one who said that writing didn't matter.]

WTF? I mean, can't we *college professors* recognize that writing has value in any profession? Or perhaps some of my colleagues are not really college professors, something I've long suspected: they're trainers at best, smiley-sticker awarders more like it.

I work so hard to combat the education myths circulating in our culture: just showing up to class is not going to result in an automatic A. Showing up is an opportunity to learn, to show what you've learned, to try wrestling with tough topics and new ways of thinking.

Of thinking.

It'd be so nice if my campus peers [?] would value thinking.

*Sigh*.

Writing is Revision

I bet you've seen this image:

Yep, the President's healthcare speech with all the revisions.

See the almost full page here, at the White House's Flickr site -- "President Barack Obama and Jon Favreau, head speechwriter, edit a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president's address to a joint session of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)"

It's so terrifically amazingly wonderful to have a literate President who cares about getting writing right.

Sincere Student Quotation

From a student essay: "I think that homosexuals are very interesting and one lesbian I know is a great person. She jokes about being a lesbian, has nothing against straight people, and has never had a problem hanging out with us."

Well, good!

T.S. Eliot

Every semester that I teach American lit with the Heath Anthology, I assign T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It always makes my students mad: they want literature to be about the author -- they usually want to know if the "story is true," by which they mean did the writer experience what s/he is writing about.

If the story does not come out of the writer's direct experience, my students often decide they don't like it or don't find it valuable. It's a weird perversion of the notion of "truth" because it ignores the power of human imagination, the most creative force we know/have.

So I assign this Eliot essay after they've also read part of two other critics: William Dean Howells, in "Criticism and Fiction," insists that a writer's world/experience *must* be conveyed in literature and is what gives the literature its value [Howells's "regionalists" or "local color" writers). Henry James, in "The Art of Fiction," conveys that an author does not have to have the experience, but can "glimpse" one and then use imagination to build a story.

Eliot seems to be a logical progression from these two, and he readies us for the 20th century and modernism (not to mention postmodernism!). I find that most students want to stay in the steady 19th century, though, with its emphasis on realism and naturalism. It's my duty to get them unstuck.

Eliot helps! He insists that powerful poetry is not about the personality of the poet -- or even the emotional experiences of the poet. Instead, the poet's mind is like a catalyst in the presence of two substances: feeling and emotion. The talented poet brings these together in some memorable way to create a poem that can take its place in the poetic tradition.

I very much like this idea, which focuses on the art instead of the artists. I guess I'm a New Critic, huh? Or rather, a fan of rhetorical analysis instead of biographical criticism.

[WEIRD! NPR's "All Things Considered" just quoted T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" as I was typing this!!]

Keeping Up

I haven't managed to keep up with blogging -- my time seems to be so short this semester. I think I've figured out one reason why: all of my classes are basically still full. I tallied the rosters today -- 142 (our professional organization, the National Council of Teachers of English has a policy statement saying no more than 60 students in a term).

No wonder I'm tired.

This semester is unusual because all the students are staying in their classes. Usually by the fourth or fifth week, students have shuffled themselves around a bit, and my 28-person composition classes (13 more than NCTE's recommendation and eight more than their maximum) settle into about 22 or 23. That's a more manageable size, given all the writing I seem to ask my students to do.

In my literature/WGST courses, I begin with 35 or 30 and settle down to a more successful 25-30. In those courses, I assign essays, too, even essay exams -- what am I thinking!? Of course, I'm thinking that students show me what they've learned by writing. Radical idea.

Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe too many students are named the same, or maybe I'm teaching too many variably-prepared students . . . but I'm having *such* a hard time this semester keeping up.

All College Day

I suppose I'm a bit weird, but I kind of like getting all the folks from my college together for a day of thought-provoking conversations and presentations (today's wasn't that thought-provoking, disappointingly: it just repeated what we already know because community colleges are like canaries in the coal mines -- we see all the stuff research institutions eventually get around to observing . . . we see it at least five years earlier). My conversations with colleagues were good, though.

Although I like these days, I do wish that it wasn't the only way we heard about important initiatives at my college. We have the *worst* communication I've ever seen, anywhere, ever.

Personally, I think it's because we've doubled in size since I've been there, but we haven't figured out how to keep up with the infrastructure. We still operate with the "Mary is the person who does that" mentality, when it's tough to know who "Mary" is or what her position is . . . we still operate as if we all saw each other in the "lunch room" once a day.

The simplest things are impossible to find because our college website is rotten: just try to search for an org chart so you can know who answers to whom, who might be responsible for something if you have a question: impossible to find, or if you do, the information is out of date. (We even have courses listed on our class schedule that do not even exist at our college!)

So for me, it's important to go to these all-day events to see people and hear what the administration has in mind. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that our communication is rotten *on purpose* to force us to go to the all-day retreats!

Finally Booked It

The flight to India for spring break . . . that is. I had to contend with too many variables, which always slows me down, but tonight I got all the parts right, I think.

• Fly out of Chicago and back into Minneapolis -- why didn't I think of that a month ago?
• Josh as substitute teacher should I get waylaid -- why didn't I think of him a month ago?
• Delta's partner KLM for the frequent flyer miles -- why didn't I think of that a month ago?

I did toy with a flight that left me in Rome for 14.35 hours . . . looked around online to see how easy it would be to get from the airport to the city center (just 30 minutes for 11 euro on a high-speed train). For about 15 minutes, that scenario looked attractive . . . but I'd have to carry around my bag (but I do travel light . . .), so Rome will have to wait for another trip.

Yay - I'll be able to celebrate Padmini's 50th with her in Delhi!