After "A Lover's Discourse"

So it is the Teacher who cares and gives
 

The Look

salty / “Seriously?”

Silent frustration provoked by inappropriate, disruptive, or silly behavior from the student, who will be subject to a warning, possible detentions, and most definitely a phone call home.

1. “[Temptation] is active when the [student] is aware of the way one [student] is connected to others” (153).  Students are not always aware of their behaviors but they are aware of performing, especially for their audience of peers.  It is not uncommon for a student to whisper to you in epiphany, “Sorry, I had no idea what I was doing.”  Ninth graders like second chances.

2. “There is [a] scenography…” in intentional ignoring:  the student must be aware you are intentionally ignoring their behavior; the student must know you are choosing not to respond; the student must remember the prior warning from yesterday’s conversation about why trying to write with the orange highlighter in their mouth does not warrant your attention unless it is causing harm to this student or another (265). But Ninth graders like narcissism*.

   

    “At one point in the lesson Ethan chose to annotate the article using his mouth...No, he was trying to write with it using his lips, not his hand...He was just being silly, trying to gain attention from the other students...Yes, I agree...this is not what we expect from students in high school. This is not high school...Is there anything else I should know about Ethan in order to support his learning in the classroom?” Ninth graders like drawing penises on desks.

Seating Chart Sudoku

“When can we choose our seats?” / controlled socializing

a map you prescribe in which you attempt to manipulate the blocking, movement, and socializing that takes place within your classroom and makes your daily environment.

1. “The [seating chart] is the organ of” classroom management (267). Some problems between personalities will evaporate when new seats are assigned. Is it enabling a student who always comes in late if you seat them by the door? Students who often smell or sneeze are placed furthest from your desk. By high school, head lice shouldn’t be a concern.

    The seating chart is comprised of five tables, which each seat 4-6 students. All seats are arranged so students can easily see the board, but often students face each other. Students must learn together. Together, students hold “the capacity for making meaning through the experience of reading…[which]... is one way that individuals are gathered into a community….[meaning is]...negotiated in a kind of collective dialogue whose operations are still not fully understood” (192).  Ninth graders like noticing which ninth graders have squeaky voices and asking whether those ninth graders have gone through puberty yet.

2.  One must sit in the front because she wears glasses, so must another because he refuses to wear them.  Student A has hearing aids. Student B has ADHD and needs to sit where they can easily stand up.  Students K and L have IEPs that require prime seating. Student X cannot sit near Student Y--they have a history.  Students Q, R, S, and T are pleasant enough, so they are put next to Students D, E, F, and J, who are the most challenging.  Student P is always absent.  Student L is big and tall, so best to leave an open seat near him. Student M and N are dating?!  Ninth graders like reading Macbeth.

Lessons on How to Read and Write Good

“obeast” / obese

“All texts are reworkings of other texts, that writing comes out of reading, that writing is always rewriting, you can see that the desirable quality we call “originality” does not mean creating something out of nothing but simply making an interesting change in what has been done before you” (150).  

1. Sometimes a student’s innocent mistake for a common word like obese can reveal the deepest layers of cultural meaning.  

“I wish that someone...had taken a quick look at the opening scenes of Bambi that Saturday afternoon and had said to himself, This movie is only going to drive the kid deeper into sexual stereotyping. It’s going to validate the worst attitudes of the adult world that surrounds him. It’s going to speed the end of his innocence” (205).  Ninth graders like Spongebob.

Missing Work

“Did I miss anything?” / “...”

Upon arriving back to school after a day-long or infinite absence, students seeks knowledge of what occurred during their time away.  You attempt to placate the malingering and recreate your earth-shattering lesson with a take-home quiz or the easy deal of copying notes from a friend.

1. You, yourself, are rarely absent because writing sub plans is often more work than powering through with a stuffy nose or stomach ache. If you must be absent, it’s a day you need to spend catching up on grading papers. All doctor’s appointments must be arranged in the precious hours of the late afternoon or during a prep period. Similar to your feelings about the dentist, ninth graders like hating their orthodontists.

“Mom”

Familiar / Caregiver

Students will slip and accidentally address you as such.

1. It’s not a new idea that in addition to teaching you are also nursing, psychoanalyzing, socializing, recruiting, coaching, counseling, feeding, parenting, and loving your students. Your job description is creating the future of our world.  

    “But that is all right with me because there is a day in every woman’s life when she hears a voice inside herself that tells her what she needs to do, that tells her what needs to come out and be heard, even if it is only from a tower, only in a forest. And if any man is wandering by and hears it, he had better have a ladder and the strength to endure the power of her tears” (280).  We want every student to grow into being the woman who hears and speaks her own voice; we want every student to be the man who has the strength to endure and listen to others different from himself.    

Ninth graders like hearing you missed them over a four-day weekend.

   

*Italicized lines are borrowed from Andrew Simmons’s prose poem “Ninth Graders Like” first published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency on January 31, 2013.   

QCQ #7

     I find critical theory and cultural studies the most fascinating of all the disciplines within English studies, and I think it’s no coincidence that as I prepared for this week’s class, I was able to better envision my path in graduate studies (!!!). I see many opportunities for teaching, learning and activism within critical theory.  For example, one goal I have is to foster a habit for critical reading within my students. It’s important to think of this kind of critical reading as a way to view the world rather than as an isolated activity  or “unit” because considering different points of view in depth is one of the most relevant literacy skills a student can learn.  Elias describes the purpose of critical theory and cultural studies as investigating how cultural trends, artifacts and “art [are]... mirror[s] of a society’s values and power structures and a site where alternatives to oppressive social systems can be formulated” (226). So many students and adults do not read this way and simply take for granted the superficial value of the information they encounter daily. Thus, critical literacy is the foundation of a democratic education.

    One of the most popular arguments I’ve heard against the practice of critical theory deals with the sacred aesthetic and ethical meanings of a text; however, from my critical studies, I understand that I can appreciate a text’s use of language and its ethical appeals, as well as understand how my culture and text’s culture have helped shape what I favor and prefer. As a student in Intro to Texts with David Jones in 2007, I created a “mystory” project based on my question about whether or not I could still enjoy reading Hemingway while also identifying myself as a feminist.  I came to the conclusion that I most certainly could because I began to understand the different lenses through which I could interact with texts. Another point raised by Elias in the her chapter that surprised did not surprise me were that some opponents to critical theory “argue that it attacks Western Values” (236). I think I most definitely fit in with the radical critical theorists who respond, “‘Yes, we do.’” True that.

In working with teenagers who are by definition rebellious,  I feel I have a lot of potential for sharing critical theory practices in my classroom. Many teenagers I know would agree “America’s melting pot is not desirable, and never existed anyway in the extremely race- and class-conscious culture of the United States”” (253). However, I feel I am not yet savvy enough to facilitate thriving discussions on racial power and privilege and sometimes feel self-conscious initiating such discussions  in my classroom. Perhaps I am reticent because I am the teacher-in-power forcing them to have this conversation. Or perhaps I have not yet fully explored my feelings about my own race and privilege. Probably both and more.

Peggy McIntosh’s article speaks to me with immediacy.  I think like many teachers I’ve thought I am teaching for social justice when we books with slaves. But really I have barely scratched the surface. I have not done enough to discuss today’s quieter dysfunctions and micro-aggressions of racism, and how privilege, according to McIntosh, can be “distinguish[ed] between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically….[how] unearned power can look like strength, when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to dominate...or not to listen” (96). I don’t want to make caucasian students feel guilty; I want to introduce these discussions as tools for becoming better readers and people. Last year I taught Octavia Butler’s Kindred for the first time to my 9th graders. That summer I had convinced my department it was a good fit and especially needed due to the lack of women authors and authors of color represented in our collection.  However, I got stuck when the students didn’t respond favorably to the text, and rather than taking time to reflect on why and sharing this reflective practice with the students, I hurried through the rest of the unit.  This year I am not sure about teaching the novel again, but as I read more critical theory, I realize the literature and the theory gives us a vehicle through which to explore ideas we might not access or verbalize otherwise. These discussions can become more productive with more practice. For example, Elias cites the theory of “double consciousness” from W. E. B. Dubois as a way to describe and “characterize...the cultural position of minority groups and women in the United States” (254). While this is not a new theory by any means, it will be for my students. We apply it Kindred’s main character Dana and her conflict of time warping between a life as a young writer in1970s America and life as a house slave on a 1850s Southern plantation. We could also investigate the double standards of Dana’s toxic relationship with Rufus, her dependent, distant ancestor, and rapist.  Using the theory of double consciousness if one way I can invite my students in engaging in critical discussions in a structured way, which can eliminate another silence.

    Something I’ve had no trouble speaking about since eighth grade is my passion for ripping apart advertising.  I remember reading the anti-consumerist young adult novel The Gospel According to Larry and discovering the magazine Adbusters. I thought I was the most subversive 13-year-old ever.  Once again, deconstructing advertising and mass consumerism are ideas I can easily adapt to a high school English classroom and might even practice the “sensationalism” to which some critics slam. However, now that I’ve read about cultural studies more broadly, I have some questions about ideas that seem trickier. Elias describes Clifford Geertz’s work as including, “the idea...that there is no “right” way to organize a social system...the other human sciences cannot impose interpretive meaning on a society from outside of its own meaning systems” (260).  If I am an American feminist scholar and disagree with the practices of genital mutilation in African countries, do I have a fair argument against this cultural practice? According to my reading of the Geertz’s idea, I do not have ground to stand on because I am criticizing a social system of which I am not a part of. Therefore, how often and in what ways do practices and methodologies within critical theory and cultural studies contradict each other? How do I make practice use of contradictory practices and methods if I wish to intervene as an activist?

    Lastly, I think it’s important to think about the practical ways critical theory and cultural studies can influence our daily choices and lives. Brummett offers discussion of how “critical studies acknowledges that power is often secured through the more traditional routes of elections and physical force. But within..there is also an awareness..that power is seized and maintained in other less obvious ways (88). One of these implicit ways power is seized and maintained is Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which Elias describes, “hegemony operates in popular culture that is generated by the whole of civil society and in which the oppressed willing participate” (259).  Thus, I can work with students in identifying examples where they can make more informed choices instead of following through with hegemonic brainwashing.  Brummet encourages interventionism, in which one participates and “gets...involved in problems in order to change the world for the better. A critic wants to step into the lives of his or her readers and give them ways to see and experience the world differently” (89).  Brummet goes on to argue that as a critic, you can’t help but intervene through texts, and I think about today and YouTube, where so many texts participatory and fan-based.  For example, all of the spin-offs of “Shit White Girls Say...to Black Girls” (I’m not sure of the original video that introduced this trope) that raise awareness about micro-aggressions and other seemingly harmless uses of stereotyping from everyday language and conversation.  Obviously, many people are creating these videos and parodies of these videos to intervene, and many people are posting in the comments sections and sharing the videos via social media. But hopefully for most who seek to intervene, merely “liking” such a video on Facebook isn’t enough.

   

   

English Education

 

    I agree with Yagelski’s main argument that the purpose of English Education is to re-examine teachers’ daily practice and work towards change that can improve our students’ vision democracy and our world; however, I find his argument lacking in specific examples and solutions. Yagelski’s experience teaching at the secondary level consists of his three years of teaching 11th and 12th grade at the private upper class boarding and day school, the Vermont Academy, so Yagelski’s ethos comes from his work in English Education at the theoretical level, and not from having taught in America’s public schools or referencing his own practices as a teacher and professor. As a secondary English Educator working in public schools, I felt I could better relate to and find inspiration from bell hooks and her first chapter from Teaching to Transgress, “Engaged Pedagogy” because her perspective as a teacher, students, and black woman speaks more persuasively to the argument that Yagelski attempts to build off of from Friere that the transgressive power of teaching comes first and foremost from our attention and use of language.

 

  Yagelski proposes the purpose of English Education is to improve our democracy by relying on Friere’s praxis as “fostering a certain kind of subjectivity and encouraging a certain kind of being-in-the-world” in our students (308). Clearly, fostering this kind of critical perspective in students would involve re-examining many traditions and practices of schooling and calling into question their limitations. Yagelski calls teachers to action by recognizing these “‘limit-situations... facing American students today...driven by a global, technologically sophisticated, and pervasive culture whose power makes Orwell’s Big Brother seem almost amateurish by comparison” (309).  In my opinion, this part of Yagelski’s argument is the most passionate and as he goes on to emphasize America’s “limit-situations” of capitalization, consumption, and climate change with specific examples about SUVs and high mortgage rates for solar-heated homes. While these problems are real and troubling, where are his specifics in how pre-service teachers can learn how to build such “utopian” relationships or create “utopian” classrooms? The fact that Yagelskis uses the word utopia to describe his mission statement for pre-teachers seems to me like a lack of understanding of the daily obstacles teacher and students encounter daily. We aren’t seeking perfection; we are seeking bridges of clear communication in which to share and learn from our differences.

More reasonably, hooks recognizes that changing education begins with changing the teacher and the teacher’s relationships with students.  I am fascinated with hooks’ discussion of her own public schooling in the introduction to her Teaching to Transgress, when she describes how damaging desegregation was to her personal education because she was forced into a classroom where the white teacher did not attempt to know her and did not understand her culture or background. This still happens today, even in an era when schools (most superficially) value multicultural and diversity, or claim to value these ideals as pillars of students’ education. In order to truly foster a healthy environment in which multiculturalism is celebrated, teachers must work towards taking care of themselves so we are able to find sameness with our students and better care for our students.  hooks describes this process as “self-actualization,” which is “a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasize[s] wholeness, a union of mind, body, and spirit” (14). I appreciate how hooks offers a more specific approach to achieving this improvement by reflecting on her own experiences as an activist, teacher and student.  Most importantly, she goes on to define “engaged pedagogy” as focusing on wholeness and well-being:

“Teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. Thich Nhat Hanh emphasized that ‘the practice of a healer, therapist, teacher or any helping professional should be directed toward his or herself first, because if the helper is unhappy, he or she cannot help many people’”(15).

Thus, hooks values and provides the solution of active and engaged pedagogy as one way to heal our schools, teachers, and students and rewrite American schooling in ways that are liberating for students.

An anecdote: Looking back, I remember a point during my freshmen year of college at UWEC when I sought critical engagement with my saxophone teacher from high school, Sue Orfield.  As an interview assignment for Theresa Kemp’s 200-level Women’s literature course that Spring, I needed to find a female in who had made and impact on my life and ask about her views on feminism. I chose a direct approach, and I asked Sue, “What are your thoughts on feminism as one of the only professional female jazz and rock saxophonists in the Midwest and country?” To my dismay, she quickly answered that feminism had nothing to do with it, ever. She had only ever cared for the music, and that her experiences were largely shaped by her life as a musician, and not as a woman.  At the time, I didn’t recognize that her answer might have been her choice to encourage me, but I already knew and had felt barriers as a jazz musician due to my gender. In this example, I learned a lot about myself and the kind of thinking I wished to pursue. For Dr. Kemp’s class, I wrote about how I wanted to pursue the question of why my gender seemed to bother me so much in the music field; I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied blindingly striving ahead and ignoring the complexities of this. In this way, through Dr. Kemp’s assignment, I demanded engaged pedagogy, and even began to work toward my own self-actualization as a student by recognizing I needed more time to think about gender and society, rather than rehearsals and private saxophone lessons. Sure, I could have pursued both, but at that time I needed a more safer home and I chose to pursue English.

It is difficult to ignore the conditions under which public schooling in many states exits and the public image of public schools and their teachers. With atrocious cuts to funding and demoralizing legislation that devalues teachers as professional, it will take all teachers building authentic relationships with their students to fix America’s schools in the public’s eye. hooks goes on to describe further ways in which teachers can empower students, and many of these I feel school administrators and school boards should use to empower teachers and citizens: “empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks...most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit” (21). Our culture and American politics resist this philosophy, but hooks reminds us that progress demands taking risks and building sites of resistance.  These sites of resistance must become our school as centers of engaged pedagogy.

Creative Writing

In Haake’s chapter “Creative Writing” I connected with her discussion of her rosy expectations for the field as a young writer and the clashing reality she experiences now.  As an undergraduate taking as many creative writing workshops as I could while toying with the idea of majoring in the discipline, I, like Haake, was motivated by my desire to just simply write. However, after a few semesters in, I recall comments from friends’ majoring in creative writing. Like Haake, they noticed how these teachers “were almost always men. And many of them were hard living--it was not unusual, in those days, for creative writing classes to take place in bars” (164). While I never met in a bar for workshop (until after I graduated), my friend took Lorrie Moore’s advanced fiction workshop and he noted how she had encouraged students to whiskey to share in the class.  Weather the invitation was literal or ironic, my friend recalls a workshop with whiskey poured into Dixie cups. My motive here is not to tattle on Moore, but to point out the prevalence of this stereotype of writer as eccentric.  While Haake uses her example to describe the “first-wave” of master writer-teachers, I feel this image still sticks today, and the stereotype of “the writer” or the “master writer-teacher” as male and hard-living has not changed despite the fact more departments employ writers of diverse backgrounds. Why is this stereotype still so prevalent and why is it fellow writers who seem to celebrate and perpetuate it?

During my time taking undergraduate creative writing workshops, I feel I learned the most about how to discuss contemporary fiction, and not as much about how to produce or revise my own.  I was never any more satisfied after a workshop of my work than I was after receiving individual feedback from one or two of my close friends or mentors.  The learning in workshop, I feel, occurred when my peers and I were building a common language to bridge what we had learned in our literature classes, our composition classes, and psychology classes, along with our own evolving voices and opinions as young writers. Also, it is important to note that I kept signing up for workshops because of the appealing reading selections, mostly short stories. During high school, I remember reading some of the classic short stories, such as “The Rocking Horse-Winner” by D.H. Lawrence and “The Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams, and feeling out of sync with the culture and register of their writing.   But when I discovered the short stories of Junot Diaz, Kevin Brockmeier, and Jhumpa Lahiri, just to name a few, I was inspired by the different techniques and voices with which these writers were able to both reach and stretch me.

ZZ Packer should have been one of these writers I discovered, but I’m not sure I was ready.  After reading “Brownies,” I am most struck by Packer’s seamless ironies, such as Arnetta gently consoling the troop’s single pacifist, “Daphne. You don’t have to fight. We’re doing this for you,” as well as Octavia and her troop’s obliviousness to their own hegemonic echolalia (13). But some of the tension of this irony is deliciously relieved when the narrator, Laurel, reaches her epiphany when she describes how her father took the opportunity of asking an Amish family to paint his porch and not say thank you.  Laurel recalls realizing “suddenly…there was something mean in the world that I could not stop” (28). To me, contemporary short story writers craft their work with such impeccable economy that closely reading one is as satisfying as solving an impossible algebra problem.

I noticed similar concision in _________ 's free indirect discourse in her short story “All That Ails You.”  _______ controls the narrative distance with precision. At the beginning of the story in learning Lottie’s history, I felt like one of the townspeople, coming to collect my lotion or tonic, and having no true insight into Lottie’s or Blackwell’s personal motives. But then I began to learn the extent to which Blackwell is taking advantage of Lottie when “Blackwell’s hand was cramped from keeping the ledger. His head was full of coins. Sheaves of money gushed from his pockets. He could not believe his goddam luck” (3).  Here we begin to zoom in on Blackwell’s thought as the language becomes his own, especially with the final cadence in realizing “his goddam luck.”  Another example of this is at the end of the story when Lottie rides into her emancipating death: “She pulled the Seniorita up a little higher, then a little higher, then a little bit higher still” (28).  While readers understand here, painfully, that Lottie’s stepfather has dismantled the ropes on the plane, which he thought Mr. Bixby would fly, and that Lottie will die, the language is Lottie’s as she breaks from the confinement of her stepfather’s household and society’s perceptions of her handicap. Thus, when she repeats, “a little higher, then a little higher,” we can appreciate that she is accepting this fate and because of it, recognizing that not all of her efforts to break free while on land were in vain. 

As I continued my undergraduate career, I decided against adding the creative writing major to my English Education degree. It would have been relatively easy, just one more workshop and completion of a short fiction thesis, but I didn’t find the department particularly welcoming. I knew I liked to write and I wanted to teach public high or middle school, so what else did I need? While there are times I wonder what a creative writing thesis would have motivated me to produce, and where I would be now as a writer, Haake reminds me, while quoting Bishop’s Teaching Lives, there are “people who tend to think in terms of service toward. I find a better home in the latter...though I want to and try to do both--serve the writer in me and serve communities of writers” (165).  While I have been fortunate to participate in some of these writerly communities Haakes describes, such as the Greater Madison Writing Project and UWEC’s Spring Composition Retreat (and now, my graduate work), I am hoping there are many creative writer-scholars (and not just Pollyanna-me)  who agree with Haake’s view that “what we have to teach our students is perhaps the greatest gift of all--writing as a way of being in the world, an organizing practice and instruction, and, although I know I’m not supposed to say so, a method, too, to mediate the madness and magic of what makes us human” (195). This is what I want from creative writing, and what I hope I can share with my students.

                       

The Heavenly Twins: Rediscovering Sarah Grand

In his chapter “Literature and Literary Criticism,” Richard C. Taylor begins by distinguishing  literary studies as a “plurality, interdisciplinarity, and transition…[that] acknowledges instability in the categories of knowledge and practice” in contrast with the “more fixed” study of literature (199-200).   This contrast is necessary in understanding the the discipline’s debate over which is question is most worthy of our time: what should we read in English verses how should we read?  I argue both questions are worthy of scholars’ attention and curricular responsibility to their students. The content of what we read, what we comprehend consciously, as well as the details that implicitly speak to us are shaped by how we read. Critical readers build an awareness for how our identities, experiences, histories, and past exposure to texts create what Spivak names “the ways we read the world” (219). Taylor makes convincing arguments against the idea of a singular “cannon,” as well as defining the discipline through literary periodicity. Thus, I agree with Taylor that welcoming interdisciplinary study and the conflicts that arise from the multiplistic nature of our discipline is what is most fruitful and stimulating.

I think it is interesting to think about how the texts were learn from and know from an early age can influence how we go on to view and create texts in the future.  I think it would be interesting for professors and their students to share their own reading and literacy autobiographies. Gertrude Stein describes this idea, in particular to literature, as having “our own history of English literature inside of us, the history as by reading we have come to know it” (200). I would argue even building an awareness of ourselves as creators of texts at an early age is another way to explore what informs our reading presently.  For example, when I was a mouthy pre-teen in the fifth grade, my mother mother assigned me to write her a letter of apology instead of grounding me. Unfortunately for me, she never chose this as an method of punishment again because my letter was too persuasive and her plan backfired; I persuaded her to let me off the hook!  Thus, early on I saw myself as an effective writer and continued to love the craft of creating and critiquing arguments (which explains why I am writing this paper for you now).

To illustrate how my undergraduate education has informed how I read, I will borrow Taylor’s crash course in close reading and use some of the main critical methods he outlines in his chapter as I share my readings of “Proem” and “The Tenor and The Boy” by Madame Sarah Grand. I will also comment on how I use these methods to read.

First, Taylor describes “the typical student trained in New Criticism” as “maintaining a focus on the language...itself” (213). With this focus on language, I am immediately aware of the title “Proem” for the prelude to the novel The Heavenly Twins. “Proem” come from Greek for “before” and “song”; however, this title can also be read as a combination of the words “prose” and “poem,” which are generally viewed as two separate genres (I don’t think Grand had heard of today’s term prose poem back in 1888). I favor my second reading of the title because it introduces the idea of challenging society’s foundation in binary norms. For example, the prelude begins with a description of the setting, emphasized with opposites, such as “the great wicked city, and over the fair flat country”(7). Thus, a binary motif is started, but then throughout is complicated. A few pages later, the township’s chime is introduced, as the not the narrator describes:

“it began to appear as if the supremacy of the great masculine ideas as at least being seriously threatened, for even in Morningquest a new voice of extraordinary sweetness had already been heard, not his, the voice of man; but theirs, the collective voice of humanity...the male and female principles which together created the universe, the infinite father and mother, without whom, in perfect accord and exact equality, the best government of nations has always been crippled and abortive ” (11).

Here, the chime represents a faith in“all-pervading good,” suggesting the chime represents characteristics of  the most humane civilizations which are detailed as both male and female.  However, later, when the chime fails and “the majority of those who had ears to hear it in the big old fashioned city heard not, use having dulled their faculties,” it has becomes an empty vessel or “double standard” for perpetuating along binary social norms (11). \

    In closely reading this passage above from “Proem,” I attempt to stick with a focus on language, but I notice I also heavily relied on background knowledge about the biography of the author, which I researched briefly before beginning the selections. This is what a biographical critic would focus on. According to my informal research online from The Literary Encyclopedia, the author of The Heavenly Twins renamed herself Madame Sarah Grand and considered herself “a new woman” living in England at the turn of the 20th century.  She was not only a writer, but a suffragist and sought to raise awareness of the dangers of sexually transmitted infections and the moral double standard associated with intercourse. Thus, I began my reading already searching for symbolism suggesting a double standard or binary opposition and couldn’t help but applying it to the rest of the piece.

    The climax of “The Tenor and The Boy” reveals the Boy as merely Angelica in disguise and the Tenor’s rejection of her despite his supposed true love. From this point on, the omniscient narration flips back and forth sharing both Angelica and the Tenor’s conflicting thoughts.  While the ending is painful, especially when reading the Tenor’s hurtful rejection, I was not surprised; however, this does not diminish the anger I feel for society’s reliance on binary norms, which is still a relevant conflict today.

Just this past week at our high school, the dance team rejected Gender and Sexuality Awareness (GSA) club’s nomination of two females (who both self-identify as gender neutral) to homecoming court. I advise GSA club and encouraged my students to take this issue to our administration. Our principal persuaded the GSA students that nothing could be done because the rules for nominating explicitly stated each co-ed club could nominate one female and one male. But our principal went on to tell the students they could work on rewriting the language of this rule and present it to MHS Student Council to potentially change the nomination process for all future dances. My students are excited about this opportunity to leave a legacy at Memorial, but I must admit I was surprised by the resistance in the first place. I wonder what kind of chapter, and novel, Madame Sarah Grand would write today and if the Tenor would be any more welcoming of love. Maybe he would, but perhaps not.

   

Study in Composition

My personal experience in a composition course is represented by the handwritten draft at the center of my collage. This is actually a scanned image of an essay I wrote my junior year of high school for AP Language and Composition.  My teacher at the time, now colleague, left her feedback in black marker; she still uses the essay as sample in her class today. When I think back to what I learned in her class, I find similarities with what Crowley describes as the composition’s historical goals: “ to develop taste, to improve...grasp of formal and mechanical correctness...to become critical thinkers, to establish personal voices, to master the composing process” (6).  But at that time, I did not think of learning in terms of those goals; I simply played school and performed well enough on the exam so that I wasn’t required to enroll in freshman composition in college. In many ways, I know look back and realize this AP class was when I was beginning my inculcation into the academic community and learning the “discursive behaviors and traits of character that qualify...to join the community” (9). Now that I’m a teacher of writing, I find these explicit and implicit goals problematic, and I wonder how I can continue to develop my teaching and not simply perpetuate through exclusive practice.

My experience teaching composition is represented by Ricardo Ponce’s painting “El Carnaval de Saturno” in the lower right hand corner.  I chose this to represent my teaching because I use this image early in the school year to show my ninth and tenth graders that each one of them is capable of thinking creatively  which is needed when composing. I ask them what they see, think, and wonder about the painting, and then I ask them to tell the story behind it and give it a title. While this is still what Crowley would describe as a “highly artificial writing situation,” as most in the English classroom are, I am attempting to surprise students into writing with a prompt that’s out of the ordinary.  

As I continued reading this week, I found many connections between my work and the current debates within the field of composition. Another example connects to the debate of how to best “engage students in repeated rehearsals of the discursive acts that occur in specific disciplines”  (Crowley 9 citing Lindemann 1993).  Even in English class at the early high school level, we attempt to practice beyond the scope of literary analysis by reading more nonfiction texts, as the Common Core dictates. However, similarly to how Crowley describes the departmental riffs between English and other disciplines, even in high school English teachers are held responsible for students’ written correctness and fluency.  Teachers of composition are not the targeters, we are the targets.

Teachers of composition are “undervalued, overworked, and underpaid,” said no teacher ever (Crowley 5). The hours spent planning, reading student work, responding, conferencing, and evaluating is incredible. Part of this problem is due to what Bartholomae describes as “distinguishing between the various material practices, institutional pressures, habits, and conventions that govern writing and schooling” (335).  Instead of truly fostering students’ acts of creation and unique voice, most of the writing instruction that goes on in high schools and freshmen-year composition courses is the process method that demands the “perfect final draft.” This demand is not only damaging to students, but also teachers. Instead, teachers of writing should “accept student writing as a starting point, as the primary text for a course of instruction, and to work with it carefully, aware of its and the course’s role in a larger cultural project” (338).  But if we are to shift this paradigm, we must value work that is ambitious, incomplete, and uncertain.

Tackling those “Thorny” questions in the field. Alan Benson’s review helped me understand more about the arguments for and against multimodality within composition. For example, in reviewing Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, Benson begins by introducing the “thorny question--what specialized disciplinary knowledge can compositionists bring to multimodal composition?” (166).  Benson summarizes Palmeri’s claim that multimodality is in our history in composition; we simply aren’t very conscious of it. (Wasn’t even prehistoric cave art multimodal?)  I agree with this point, and I am always wary when “new technology” is blamed various human behaviors and shortcomings.  When teaching high school students, I consider how picture books can engage. Picture books include both text and pictures (some even have extra-sensory pages like Pat the Bunny). I’ve used picture books when introducing concepts from critical literacy, such as “Whose voice is heard, and whose is left out? How would this story be different if the main character were of a different race/gender/class/sexual orientation?” Students are already familiar with picture books, so the leap of writing one of their own that is critically aware is an awesome project in composition. Some thorns are necessary in causing us to re-examine missed opportunities in our instruction.

The role of composition in the English department is represented by The Royal Tenenbaums movie poster because we are one big, happy, dysfunctional family. Bartholomae makes the point that composition’s conflicts with those outside of the field are not so much about the differences in disciplines, but “the lines of interest [that] separate...those committed to basic instruction...from those interested in ‘advanced work’” (335). I believe that all those hired to teach should value learning enough to expect to teach at least some introductory-level course work regularly; however, there are always members in any family that feel they deserve special treatment. Also, to me it makes logical sense why composition has been house within the English department, but something I am curious about is if any other fields ever take ownership of teaching Composition 101 for Engineers, for example? Or Composition 101 for the Sciences?

The role of composition in the academy is represented by Plato’s Academy.  I believe all teachers are teachers of literacy, so I find the problem of specialization dangerous to the practice of good teaching at the introductory level.  Crowley describes how directors of composition programs must employ instructors “they did not hire and who may or may not know enough or care enough about the work they do in order to perform it well” (6).  My question is why doesn’t academia value learning enough to ensure quality teaching, especially at the freshmen level?  Crowley goes on to describe the serendipitous victory of such programs, which isn’t by plan but mere chance. I, too, think more tenured faculty should teach, and want to teach these courses, out of the love of learning.

Multimodality in Composition is represented by this collage itself. I made this collage by using an app called BeFunky that my students showed me as we were working on our American Dream collages before reading Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men about two weeks ago.  The app is free and has excellent editing features, but how you can share your creation takes up about just as much space on the screen as the cool editing tools. Thus,I find multimodality is best defined by its authentic social qualities rather than its extra-sensory flashiness. Yancey would agree with me, as she states, “if we believe writing is social, should the system of circulation--the paths that the writing takes--extend beyond and around the single path from student to teacher?” (807).  I’m not sure how many of my stduents shared their collages through social media, but we also have them on display in the classroom. As I continue to teach composition, I hope to include more of Yancey’s guiding points:

• “consider the issue of intertextual circulation: how what they are composing relates or compares to “real world” genres;
• consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be and then create and share those different communication pieces in those different media, to different audiences;
• think explicitly about what they might “transfer” from one medium to the next; what moves forward, what gets left out, what gets added--and what they have learned about composing in this transfer process;
• consider how to transfer what they have learned in one site and how that could or could not transfer to another, be that site on campus or off;
• think about how these practices help prepare them to become members of a writing public” (807).  

Composing for Authentic Audiences and Circulation is represented by the image of a literal concert audience. Yancey continues to make great points about moving to “a new model of composing where students are explicitly asked to engage in these consideration, to engage in these activities, to develop as members of a writing public” (808). I’m interested in teaching writers, not writing, as I’ve stated earlier, and I have done a lot of work trying different portfolio assessments in my classroom. Over this past summer, I began feeling discouraged because after trying two years of different methods, I came to the conclusion my students were simply not writing well enough to be able to see or describe their growth.  Now, after reading Yancey’s text, I want to try portfolios with a new, multi-genre approach.  Yancey suggests,  “as [the students] move from medium to medium, they consider what they move forward, what they leave out, what they add, and for each of these write a reflection in which they consider how the medium itself shapes what they create” (812).  On a higher level, Yancey describes the culminating project where students “write a reflective theory about what writing is and how it is influenced or shaped or determined by media and technology” and I would argue society, self, and the list goes on and on (812).

The role of composition in the community is represented by the photo of the confluence of Eau Claire’s rivers because while beautiful, communities often come into contention over change, just as Eau Claire has over the building project.  While we want to preserve best practices and traditions, we also need to listen to all voices to enact and support purposeful change. I found Bartholomae’s description of the “critical purchase” on a text fascinating when the chemistry teacher read the English paper and found it appropriately flowery despite the paper’s massive shortcomings according to the English teacher. This discussion of viewing someone else to match your perception of them also reminded me of our discussion on The Heavenly Twins and how problematic this can be!  Bartholomae points out that this problem is caused by “our inability to talk with each other about writing, about the student text and what it represents” (331).  Thus, something is broken within our community and the solution is better communication about composition, ironically.

Composition as Learning and Practical Criticism is represented by the drawing in the center which is titled “Self-deception” by an anonymous artist because more honest self-reflection is needed in composition courses for students to become and see themselves as effective writers. What also comes to mind now is one of Yancey’s chosen side-quotes from Marshall McLuhan, “we look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future” (811). Our very own classrooms are burning to the ground while we spend hours each night scrawling red pen across students supposed “final” drafts.  A more hopeful future is what Bartholomae describes with writing that is authentic but maybe messy and unfinished.  I am fascinated with this idea not only because I’m already bored teaching about comma splices and topic sentences, but because I want to “teach students to question the text by reworking it, perhaps attending to detail in one week, perhaps breaking or experimenting with the narrative structure the next, perhaps writing alternative opens or ending, perhaps writing alternative scenes of confrontation, perhaps adding text that does not fit, perhaps adding different voices or points of view, perhaps writing several version of who the writer...might be” (342). Writing is an action and writing is thinking and writing is learning, so more work should be expected in the present tense.