I may restate myself from the Take 20 response paper, because that paper sums up a lot of my thoughts on this topic.
The "End" of Composition
Composition exists to give students skills in communication which can transfer from freshman comp to senior English, from analyzing a chemistry lab to the workplace. Composition should teach students to formulate a clear thesis from an idea, and to understand the main point of essays, articles, speeches, etc. It should teach students different methods of persuasion, and which are more effective. Composition should also teach students to be critical thinkers.
The Means to the "End"
1. Develop a list of transferable skills: summarizing and paraphrasing, writing a professional letter and e-mail, basic grammar (punctuation, capitalization, sentance construction), maybe even grant-writing and internship/graduate school application letters. Create a class based on these transferable skills, possibly called "Business Writing," and require students to take it during their junior year. I think that's the best time - students will need to start thinking about internships that summer, graduate school the following fall, and a job the following spring.
This course will also address the need for critical thinking. Students will be given essays and articles to read and summarize; later in the semester, students will identify the methods of persuasion used by an author, and which methods are most effective. Students should also bring in examples of various persuasive tools. Also, students will watch speeches, and determine the persuasive techniques used. Students will learn the concept of counter-arguments (which they should be familiar with by junior year), and will read various work, including their own from other courses, to determine where a counter-argument would be effective.
2. Develop major-specific courses; or, at the very least, offer one course in "writing in the humanities" and one course in "writing in the sciences." Require students to take one of these courses their freshman year, depending on their major. If a student is undeclared, he or she may choose one to take; however, to graduate with a BS, a student must take "writing in the sciences"; to graduate with a BA, a student must take "writing in the humanities."
a. Writing in the humanities: Cover proper form of documentation for English, history and psychology papers (ie. parenthetical documentation vs footnotes vs endnotes). Also, proper tense use in history papers (past) vs literature papers (present). Explain passive and active voice, when it is appropriate to use one or the other. Focus on thesis, transitions, argument and counter-arguments, different schools of literary and historical analysis. Teach basic research skills, specific to the liberal arts. Require a research paper.
b. Writing in the sciences: Cover proper documentation in various fields (physics, biology, chemistry). Also, discuss proper tense use, and explain that use of the passive voice is appropriate in scientific articles. Teach the conventions of a basic lab report and scholarly articles. Teach basic research skills, specific to sciences. Require a research paper.
Feasibility
Accomplishing courses such as this on a large scale would require extensive teacher and grader training, an extremely specific syllabus including in class activities and out of class assignments. It would require a lot of input from various departments and cooperation of departments in deciding what material to include and what to omit. Students would need to enter college with an idea of their area of study, something often not decided until junior year. To be most effective, the major specific courses would use work from the students other courses, such as a history or english paper. This assumes the students are taking a course in their major freshman year.
Can this be done on a large scale? The business writing class can. It would be possible to make assignments for that course which would easily fit into a system such as TOPIC. Would a discipline specific course work in a system such as TOPIC? Yes, if a system like TOPIC was created to exist seperatly from the humanities TOPIC, for the science course. It would require a lot of training for graders and teachers, since there wouldn't just be a course in "English Writing" or "History Writing."
Conclusion
I have never taught in a classroom. I have only been a student in a classroom. Is this too much to expect from students, from teachers, from graders? I don't know. Is this something one can actually accomplish in a classroom in one semester? I don't know. I guess if something like this is ever implemented, I'll see.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Philosophy of Thinking
Of course there are different philosophies of teaching - otherwise we wouldn't be coming up with our own philosophy, Dr. Rice would just tell us what the one teching philosophy is.
A teaching philosophy is, as far as I can define it, to what end a teacher structures her class in a certain way. That's wordy. What I mean is, a teaching philosophy isn't just sitting on a throne saying, "I believe my job as a teacher is to help students become better at writing/at reading/morally/professionally, etc." You have to come up with a way to achieve that goal, and a reason for thinking that it is the reason for teaching in the first place.
Let's see, some different philosophies.
1. I believe correctness of form is most important for my students, because in the workplace, form is vital to success.
2. I believe teaching should foster creativity, because the work world will teach students correctness, but the classroom may be the only place where their minds are allowed to stretch.
3. I believe teaching should create socially and morally responsible individuals, because knowledge without responsibility is dangerous.
4. I believe teaching should primarily focus on theories, because once a student knows the theory, he or she can look up specific examples in a text-book, but drawing conclusions from specifics may be too difficult.
5. I believe students should learn to draw conclusions from specific examples, because then the theories become their own, and they develop critical thinking skills.
Okay, I think that's enough. My own teaching philosophy will be based on the needs of students within academia, the needs of students once they leave academia, and a combination of 4 and 5 - I'll give students the building block theories, but ask them to take it a lot further, to develop thinking skills. My teaching philosophy: teach the kids to think critically. If someone can think critically about an essay, he or she can think critically about life choices.
That may be a little over the top. I don't know. I know that's vague, too. How do you teach kids to think? ANd how do you keep them engaged in wanting to learn to think? I'm still working out the details...
A teaching philosophy is, as far as I can define it, to what end a teacher structures her class in a certain way. That's wordy. What I mean is, a teaching philosophy isn't just sitting on a throne saying, "I believe my job as a teacher is to help students become better at writing/at reading/morally/professionally, etc." You have to come up with a way to achieve that goal, and a reason for thinking that it is the reason for teaching in the first place.
Let's see, some different philosophies.
1. I believe correctness of form is most important for my students, because in the workplace, form is vital to success.
2. I believe teaching should foster creativity, because the work world will teach students correctness, but the classroom may be the only place where their minds are allowed to stretch.
3. I believe teaching should create socially and morally responsible individuals, because knowledge without responsibility is dangerous.
4. I believe teaching should primarily focus on theories, because once a student knows the theory, he or she can look up specific examples in a text-book, but drawing conclusions from specifics may be too difficult.
5. I believe students should learn to draw conclusions from specific examples, because then the theories become their own, and they develop critical thinking skills.
Okay, I think that's enough. My own teaching philosophy will be based on the needs of students within academia, the needs of students once they leave academia, and a combination of 4 and 5 - I'll give students the building block theories, but ask them to take it a lot further, to develop thinking skills. My teaching philosophy: teach the kids to think critically. If someone can think critically about an essay, he or she can think critically about life choices.
That may be a little over the top. I don't know. I know that's vague, too. How do you teach kids to think? ANd how do you keep them engaged in wanting to learn to think? I'm still working out the details...
Friday, September 21, 2007
Process: The Product of Writing
Malea Powell’s focus on rhetoric in her classes has prompted me to think about how I would teach, and to what end. After watching Take 20, I believe that the process of writing begins long before the physical writing of a draft. The first step is teaching students to follow and then create a logical argument, to come up with counter-arguments, to research, to use evidence effectively to prove a point. A student can learn the above skills through writing, but there are also other options.
In Take 20, one of the teachers mentioned having students write in class to practice. I would like to take this a step further: have students write in class, but also edit their own work, from a previous week, during class. Put your own writing up on the screen, and walk your students through the editing process. How do you look at your own work? Put up other writing samples. Ask for examples of counter-arguments within the text, or – perhaps more importantly – where the author should have added a counter-argument. Where is the author missing evidence, or using evidence ineffectively? Then, how can the author fix these problems?
I think the following quotes from Take 20 would be extremely useful in helping students consider writing as an ongoing process rather than a final product: “Nobody’s writing is ever finished, just due.” I’ll paraphrase the other quote: you can’t do writing wrong, because, like making a clay pot, you can always do it again; you just have to make sure you have enough clay. Also, straying away from Take 20, Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones) comes to mind: If you want to write, write. Despite my emphasis on editing, students have to practice writing to get any better. (Side note: If I was in the Take 20 video and had to pick a book for writing, I’d go with Writing Down the Bones. It’s for creative writers, but has some great quotes about writing in general.)
Emphasize reading as part of the process of writing. The point of considering writing as a “process” is to improve the product, right? Exposure to correct use of ideas, language, concepts, and arguments is one of the most effective ways to learn the skills yourself. When Dr. Rice passes around his current personal reading choices, that’s what he’s doing – he’s exposing us to new ideas, new books we might never have bothered to look at before. Do that with your own students. Have a student pick a book they liked and bring it to class, pass it around. Don’t just limit discussion to books – get students interested in informative TV shows, podcasts, NPR, a lecture series on campus. The point is exposure to good language, good rhetoric, and well-articulated ideas, and this happens in places other than books. We’re not just teaching students to write logically and clearly; we’re teaching them to be better readers of people, of speeches, and of written work. I want students to leave a class able to write well, but also able to identify writing which is purposefully manipulative, illogical, unclear, or vague -- and to know to take those kinds of writing with a grain of salt.
Once again, a specific project comes to my mind: have students rewrite an unclear news brief, bring articles into class that are unclear or have faulty logic. Have students complie a list of writing they might do for their future careers: memo, resume, proposal, grant, article, letter; then, a list of the writing they need to learn for college: academic papers, essays, scholarship applications.
Workplace writing has a different form than academic writing, to be sure, but all writing shares a similar thought process: idea, edit, research, evidence, follow-through with an idea, determine counterarguments, clarify, and simplify. This is true of all writing. Even creative writing. Even memos. The amount of time, the depth of thought, the audience, the purpose may change; but the process, the way of thinking, does not. Teach the process, and students will gather skills which will apply not only across the disciplines, but beyond academia, into each student's work, social and personal life.
In Take 20, one of the teachers mentioned having students write in class to practice. I would like to take this a step further: have students write in class, but also edit their own work, from a previous week, during class. Put your own writing up on the screen, and walk your students through the editing process. How do you look at your own work? Put up other writing samples. Ask for examples of counter-arguments within the text, or – perhaps more importantly – where the author should have added a counter-argument. Where is the author missing evidence, or using evidence ineffectively? Then, how can the author fix these problems?
I think the following quotes from Take 20 would be extremely useful in helping students consider writing as an ongoing process rather than a final product: “Nobody’s writing is ever finished, just due.” I’ll paraphrase the other quote: you can’t do writing wrong, because, like making a clay pot, you can always do it again; you just have to make sure you have enough clay. Also, straying away from Take 20, Natalie Goldberg (author of Writing Down the Bones) comes to mind: If you want to write, write. Despite my emphasis on editing, students have to practice writing to get any better. (Side note: If I was in the Take 20 video and had to pick a book for writing, I’d go with Writing Down the Bones. It’s for creative writers, but has some great quotes about writing in general.)
Emphasize reading as part of the process of writing. The point of considering writing as a “process” is to improve the product, right? Exposure to correct use of ideas, language, concepts, and arguments is one of the most effective ways to learn the skills yourself. When Dr. Rice passes around his current personal reading choices, that’s what he’s doing – he’s exposing us to new ideas, new books we might never have bothered to look at before. Do that with your own students. Have a student pick a book they liked and bring it to class, pass it around. Don’t just limit discussion to books – get students interested in informative TV shows, podcasts, NPR, a lecture series on campus. The point is exposure to good language, good rhetoric, and well-articulated ideas, and this happens in places other than books. We’re not just teaching students to write logically and clearly; we’re teaching them to be better readers of people, of speeches, and of written work. I want students to leave a class able to write well, but also able to identify writing which is purposefully manipulative, illogical, unclear, or vague -- and to know to take those kinds of writing with a grain of salt.
Once again, a specific project comes to my mind: have students rewrite an unclear news brief, bring articles into class that are unclear or have faulty logic. Have students complie a list of writing they might do for their future careers: memo, resume, proposal, grant, article, letter; then, a list of the writing they need to learn for college: academic papers, essays, scholarship applications.
Workplace writing has a different form than academic writing, to be sure, but all writing shares a similar thought process: idea, edit, research, evidence, follow-through with an idea, determine counterarguments, clarify, and simplify. This is true of all writing. Even creative writing. Even memos. The amount of time, the depth of thought, the audience, the purpose may change; but the process, the way of thinking, does not. Teach the process, and students will gather skills which will apply not only across the disciplines, but beyond academia, into each student's work, social and personal life.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Williams, ICON, Ma and Pa
I'm having trouble writing this blog, so I'm going to resort to sub-headings. This is in no particular order.
Grading
I have an anecdote about grading. My freshman English teacher in college allowed us as many revisions as we wanted on any essay. He attached comments about the content of the essay and the quality of the ideas to the back. On the essay itself, he circled every grammar mistake he found and wrote the page number in our handbook corresponding to the error. Although this was a lot of work up front for him, I found it particularly effective.
First off, all revisions had to fix every one of the grammar mistakes, and in order to figure out what I'd done wrong, I had to look up every one on my own, and figure out how to correct the grammar myself. There were a lot of mistakes I learned to fix because I got tired of looking them up over and over again with every essay.
Also, although in theory a student could rewrite a paper a thousand times, in reality, we had better things to do than spend yet another hour rewriting. Usually, then, the second draft would correct nearly all the errors. We didn't have time to write a third and fourth draft while writing a new essay the next week for his class.
And with this method, I got the idea that he cared more about the content of ideas than the grammar. The grammar was important, which is why you had to revise all the grammar to get an A, but it wasn't the point of the assignment.
Williams
I see the benefit of Williams' approach to writing. I would have enjoyed such a class a lot. However, that said, I think he should have had a mandatory meeting at the middle of the semester. As a student, I would be upset if I'd gone through an entire semester thinking my work was "A" quality, and then in my conference found out it was actually only "B" quality.
Also, I still can't figure out how to make this work on a large scale. I think it's a good way to get students to write more, which will help improve their writing through basic practice, but without lots of teacher/student contact, I don't see how it will work.
I do not think TOPIC is the best solution to the problem of getting people to write more, and therefore write better. I think the best solution is quite simply more teachers; but, for obvious economic reasons, that is not always possible. I've been thinking about where TOPIC succeds and fails since our class on Wednesday.
I don't have conclusions, just some thoughts. First, I would rather be teaching a class and grading the papers for that class; then, a teacher from another class could be a second grader. But then I could be certain that the comments the student gets match the instruction he or she has recieved in my class. I realize that laws about who can teach/graduate hours required limit this possibility.
I believe it would be helpful to have one grader who focuses on grammar and a different grader who specialized in content. How would you weigh the two different grades, in the context of the course? I don't know.
I thought the Ma and Pa observations were interesting, but only as they might make a teacher or grader look at his or her own method of grading, and say - hey, I mark comma splices because it's easy. Maybe I should explain some bigger concepts. But how does that help someone teaching five courses, who doesn't have the time to explain why one sentance is off and another works well?
In the end, I stand by my comment in class: there should be one semester of general composition instruction and one semester of specialized composition in the student's major. End of story.
Grading
I have an anecdote about grading. My freshman English teacher in college allowed us as many revisions as we wanted on any essay. He attached comments about the content of the essay and the quality of the ideas to the back. On the essay itself, he circled every grammar mistake he found and wrote the page number in our handbook corresponding to the error. Although this was a lot of work up front for him, I found it particularly effective.
First off, all revisions had to fix every one of the grammar mistakes, and in order to figure out what I'd done wrong, I had to look up every one on my own, and figure out how to correct the grammar myself. There were a lot of mistakes I learned to fix because I got tired of looking them up over and over again with every essay.
Also, although in theory a student could rewrite a paper a thousand times, in reality, we had better things to do than spend yet another hour rewriting. Usually, then, the second draft would correct nearly all the errors. We didn't have time to write a third and fourth draft while writing a new essay the next week for his class.
And with this method, I got the idea that he cared more about the content of ideas than the grammar. The grammar was important, which is why you had to revise all the grammar to get an A, but it wasn't the point of the assignment.
Williams
I see the benefit of Williams' approach to writing. I would have enjoyed such a class a lot. However, that said, I think he should have had a mandatory meeting at the middle of the semester. As a student, I would be upset if I'd gone through an entire semester thinking my work was "A" quality, and then in my conference found out it was actually only "B" quality.
Also, I still can't figure out how to make this work on a large scale. I think it's a good way to get students to write more, which will help improve their writing through basic practice, but without lots of teacher/student contact, I don't see how it will work.
I do not think TOPIC is the best solution to the problem of getting people to write more, and therefore write better. I think the best solution is quite simply more teachers; but, for obvious economic reasons, that is not always possible. I've been thinking about where TOPIC succeds and fails since our class on Wednesday.
I don't have conclusions, just some thoughts. First, I would rather be teaching a class and grading the papers for that class; then, a teacher from another class could be a second grader. But then I could be certain that the comments the student gets match the instruction he or she has recieved in my class. I realize that laws about who can teach/graduate hours required limit this possibility.
I believe it would be helpful to have one grader who focuses on grammar and a different grader who specialized in content. How would you weigh the two different grades, in the context of the course? I don't know.
I thought the Ma and Pa observations were interesting, but only as they might make a teacher or grader look at his or her own method of grading, and say - hey, I mark comma splices because it's easy. Maybe I should explain some bigger concepts. But how does that help someone teaching five courses, who doesn't have the time to explain why one sentance is off and another works well?
In the end, I stand by my comment in class: there should be one semester of general composition instruction and one semester of specialized composition in the student's major. End of story.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Composition's Three Most Valuable Players
I would say the three most important qualities of composition are: understanding of subject/research, ability to persuade, voice. I place understanding of subject/research first because I get annoyed when people write, however skillfully, about something they do not understand. Ability to persuade comes before voice because all "voice" is not necessarily good. My seven year old cousin has voice in her writing - she sounds like a seven year old. Voice must be used for a purpose, and I believe having an audience in mind and persuading that audience gives voice a purpose.
The order of importance also has something to do with how easy or difficult I imagine it would be to teach the skills. It's relatively easy to get across the importance of understanding one's subject, and also easy to explain to a student how to solve the problem - if you don't understand, then go research.
A trickier subject is persuasion, as it requires writers to go beyond themselves to see another person's point of view. Then, the writer must figure out what motivates that other person, how to best persuade him or her. In my opinion, the art of persuasion is this odd blend of turning an objective understanding of other individuals into a subjective, tailored appeal which may or may not touch on reason, logic or anything resembling the apparant objective truth.
Voice is one of those things some people have because they spend elementary school learning to write short stories. Other people spent their formative years having TAAS test concepts crammed down their throats, and so all originality has been taught out of their writing. I wrote stories; voice was not difficult for me. But trying to teach voice? I don't know how to do that, exactly. Somehow, you have to get across this idea: I want to hear your voice -- not the way you actually speak, but some slightly more formalized way of speaking which will feel totally unnatural, and I want you to make that more formalized speech your own. Good luck to all current teachers on voice. I think it's important in the long haul for effective writing and public speaking, and grammar finds itself in this section for me. If you want an educated writing voice, then part of developing your voice on page is learning at least semi-proper grammar. And, I imagine myself telling a room full of eager students, you want an educated writing voice for all academic papers.
That's all for me and the three important composition concepts. Thoughts?
The order of importance also has something to do with how easy or difficult I imagine it would be to teach the skills. It's relatively easy to get across the importance of understanding one's subject, and also easy to explain to a student how to solve the problem - if you don't understand, then go research.
A trickier subject is persuasion, as it requires writers to go beyond themselves to see another person's point of view. Then, the writer must figure out what motivates that other person, how to best persuade him or her. In my opinion, the art of persuasion is this odd blend of turning an objective understanding of other individuals into a subjective, tailored appeal which may or may not touch on reason, logic or anything resembling the apparant objective truth.
Voice is one of those things some people have because they spend elementary school learning to write short stories. Other people spent their formative years having TAAS test concepts crammed down their throats, and so all originality has been taught out of their writing. I wrote stories; voice was not difficult for me. But trying to teach voice? I don't know how to do that, exactly. Somehow, you have to get across this idea: I want to hear your voice -- not the way you actually speak, but some slightly more formalized way of speaking which will feel totally unnatural, and I want you to make that more formalized speech your own. Good luck to all current teachers on voice. I think it's important in the long haul for effective writing and public speaking, and grammar finds itself in this section for me. If you want an educated writing voice, then part of developing your voice on page is learning at least semi-proper grammar. And, I imagine myself telling a room full of eager students, you want an educated writing voice for all academic papers.
That's all for me and the three important composition concepts. Thoughts?
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