Ann George

Ann George's essay took me a while to get into and to make sense out of. It may have been the name-dropping. But once I did get into it, some things jumped out at me. I thought it was intersting how she talked about liberalism versus practicality. It's a nice idea, in theory, to let students have their own take on their assignments, or to make out of the curriculum what they will. But, in the end it should be up to the teacher to decide how they should do their assignments, because it is the teacher's job to prepare them for the real world. As much as college can seem like a bubble sometimes, it is in fact there to train students to go into jobs where they will be expected to follow certain rules. Because they still have the status of students, the want to rebel against the system. But they are slowly learning to be responsible adults, at the same time. Someone has to be in charge, and that person is the teacher. That's what she's there for. I thought it was interesting that she referred to this as a paradox. That having someone in control actually opens up the classroom to democracy.

collaborative pedagogy

When I hear "collaboration" I can't help think of group work. Two or more people physically occupying the same space and working together on a project. But, if some definitions of collaboration seem to imply plagarism, then my idea is probably a little off. After reading Howard's essay, I can't help but think of collaboration as a kind of collective of every person who has ever contributed to the field. In the end, as I've said in some of my other posts, I don't really believe that there's any such thing as a completley original idea. Historically, almost every person who came up with some brilliant breakthrough was helped along the way by others who completed the steps it took to get there. Isaac Newton discovered gravity as a force, but this wouldn't have made any practical sense for our universe until after we knew that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around. Knowlege is constantly building on itself, and although authorship and ownership is very important to us all right now, we can't deny that we've all had some help along the way.
Collaborative learning and collaborative discussion, in classrooms, seem like a good way to implement collaboration. I like the idea of working together to bounce ideas around and hearing what everyone else has to say on a subject. I have a problem with the collaborative writing, though. This may be because I immediately think of situations in which one student does all of the actual work, and everyone else takes the credit even though they didn't do anything. The way Howard described it, and the guidelines she had make it seem feasible, as long as the assignment is something that lends itself well to collaboration.

The Sticky Embrace

Let me start off by saying, I had a lot of trouble following this article, as well as the previous ones from Writing New Media. I'm not sure if it's the terminology, or the word order, the name dropping... or maybe it's me and I just need to read more, and am a prime example of the failure of the education system. Either way, I had issues with the text, and so I may not be getting out of these what I should be. But here goes.
When Wysocki started to talk about her confusion at the contradiction of her reaction to the Peek ad, I felt I could relate. Only, I broke my reactions down into a simpler analysis, and eventually decided that I was more impressed than appalled at the ad. While Wysocki analzyed the artistic aspects and decided that this way her emotions could remain mixed, I felt like I had to pick a side. And I decided that I was more impressed than appalled. I read the ad as more artistic than pornographic. Yes, the woman is portrayed as an object, something pretty to look at, but to me this adds to the "artsy-ness" of the ad. Her proportions, the shape of her body, are too unrealistic for me to take seriously.
Of course, Wysocki found her pleasure easier to explain than her anger. Her research on visual composition told her what it was about the ad that made it pleasant to look at. And then she points out the flaw with that analysis, saying that "we are not encouraged to ask about the woman in the ad as a woman, only as a shape." A simply structural analysis of the ad takes it out of time and place and history and takes away any social consequences. This is the comfortable world I want to stay in when I look at this ad. I don't want to think about what this ad could potentially be saying about the objectification of women. Or what that says about the society I'm living in. But if I am forced to look at this composition from all angles, take into consideration every meaning, it is so obvious just how important visual literacy is.

I used to refer to myself as "a feminist's worst nightmare" because my life's ambition is to be a housewife. But the more I read and the more ads like this I look at, the more I feel that, as a woman living in the 21st century, feminism is not optional.

Box Logic

Boxes. I see lots of boxes. Are these actual boxes? Boxes full of stuff that means something to the person who put it in the box. Some of the boxes Sirc refers to are actual boxes. The boxes of collected items, or the puzzle-like box mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. But for the second half of the essay I'm not sure if he's referring to real or metaphorical boxes.
The assignments themselves don't ask students to construct literal boxes, so this leads me to define a box as simply something that houses several images, pieces, of writing, or items that are unconnected but have a theme running through them. It can be any theme. And then it is the reader's job to make their own meaning of what they have been presented with.
The 'box logic' seems best to be applied to specific assignments, like the kinds provided in the book. I can't see it as the basis for an entire course. Unless, by the end of the course, every piece of work a student has completed is put together in a box.
Then again, Sirc says he would rather "err on the side of [teaching] life" as opposed to whatever formula is needed to pass college requirements. Ideally, these two ideas would fall hand in hand, but in reality that doesn't always happen. What I'm still not sure of is how a box structure is any more like life than the linear formats we have gotten used to. Perhaps it's that life doesn't come at us in neat, linear forms. It comes in jumbles and chaos and it is up to us to make meaning out of it. Still, even as I begin to see how this could make sense, I can't help feeling like I'm missing something.

writer's memo

I loved Sommers' piece about the Writer's Memo. I can think of times when I would have liked to explain things about my paper to my teacher, but there was no such opportunity. With the memo, everything is included. Not only can students clarify to the teacher what they mean, and then get some good, useful feedback, but they also have a chance to really examine what they are doing with their work. It becomes a lot easier to put a paper together if you have a plan for it and know what it is you are trying to argue. The memo helps teachers "become collaborators rather than judges" because they are in on what is going on in the student's head. If the student is stuck somwhere, the writer's memo can help indicate where exactly the problem is.
Not only does the memo guide the teacher in what to look for in the student's essay, it also helps guide the student when it asks for audience and purpose. These questions are important to keep in mind and will help drive the student's writing. A lot of the time papers can seem pointless, but if students are reminded of a purpose, they are more motivated to write. And if they keep their audience in mind this helps with the style that they will write in. Also, audience determines how a topic will be approached. If the audience is well versed on the paper topic, then the writer won't need to establish a lot of background. Having an audience in mind accounts for a lot of the choices one makes in writing, and it's important to keep students aware of this. When they know why they've made certain choices, they can more easily remedy a problem. It's a lot of extra work to think about one's rhetorical choices if one has never done it before, but I think it would be worth it, especially in long, in-depth papers.

Selfe

Up until I read Selfe's essay, I didn't really think about the visual as requiring a separate kind of literacy, but if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. We are constantly bombareded with images that are designd to sway us a certain way about a product or a political view, and sometimes they work without us even realizing why. Selfe says we tend to introduce "visual texts as the less-important and less-intellectual sidekicks of alphabetic texts." It's true. Usually, in a classroom, the picture is secondary to the written text. It supplements it, but never makes its own statement.
I thought it was interesting that she refers to this as a "verbal bias," although I suppose that's basically what it is. Because visuals are becoming so prominent, I think it's helpful for students to aquire some knowlege on how to read, compose, and analyze those kinds of texts the same way they've been analyzing purely written texts for generations. However, we do have to acknowlege that it would be a difficult transition process. Most of the visual texts out there do have some written component. And when they don't, we become really confused.
While I think it's important to become comfortable with visual texts, and I think the activities on composing visuals are very good, we should also think about how difficult it is to interpret written materials, sometimes. Poetry, for example, can often be interpreted in many different ways, and we will never know for sure if we've gotten it "right." I think the same can be said for many visual texts. Some visual texts are more difficult to read than others, often depending on how linear they are. In the case of both visual and written texts, we can never be sure that we've understood everything the author wanted us to, and we often find meanings which the author didn't intend outright.

Student text

When I read the first few paragraphs of Bannon and Knoblauch's essay, I couldn't help nodding in agreement, remembering some of the texts I've had to read in English class over the years. When they say that "we will tolerate writing from an author which appears to be unusually difficult, even obscure or downright confusing" I thought about Faulkner and some of the other writers I've had trouble reading. Of course, writers like that have their reputations established, so of course I can't really compare them to a first-year comp student. But it's something to think about. What, except practice and some life experience, makes Faulkner's writing any better than Jimmy Doe's?
I like where this essay goes, showing teachers how to help students with their writing. It's so true that we all have our own ideal texts for what we think an assignment or piece of writing should look like. And because 18-year-olds have little or no authority, we can be very quick to dismiss some of the choices they make. I think the methods described strike a good balance between giving both students and teachers authority over the text. Teachers should be a guide to help students write better, and in the end it's up to the students how they are going to say what they want to say. No matter what the assignment is, it's the student who is producing the work. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to work with what the student is producing, instead of what we think he should be producing. This would also help the student become more confident in his writing, which will make it better.

the moment I've been waiting for

Here we go, some answers to that age-old question of assessment. What are we assessing? Beach and Probst have a brilliant suggestion: ask the students! Talk to them. Reading and writing is a dialogue. I love it. I wish I had looked at revising this way in my first year composition class.
Probst gives a general overview of the attitude that a teacher should have while evaluating student writing. He compares it to reading literature. The only difference is, with a student paper the reader has the opportunity to directly converse with the writer. Together, they can figure out what the meaning is, and even find a way to make that meaning more clear during revision.
Beach breaks down what exactly it is teachers should be looking for in students' essays. He classifies parts of the paper, not into intro/body/conclusion, but rather by characteristics that contribute to the writing style. The questions that really need to be answered involve the goal of the paper, the audience, and rhetorical strategies. If the opening paragraph seems "weak," the student is urged to figure out why and come up with a specific solution. This requires the writer to really look at what her goal is in writing the paper the way she did. I think that using the outline provided in Beach's essay is helpful for student essay revisions.
While reading these essays, I realized that both authors talk about the way that students are used to revising, and that the new revision strategies will need to be talked. That students will need to be "weaned" off the ways that they were accustomed to. My reaction to that is a simple, "duh!" This is life. As we develop skills and learn more about the theory behind them, it makes perfect sense that we will have to approach them in new, better ways. In math, we start out learning that you can't subtract 4 from 2. Or that you can't divide 7 by 8. And then we learn about negative numbers and fractions. But only once we've learned the basics. College writing is different from high school writing. I dont' know if that's good or bad, but that's the way it is. And there's nothing wrong with learning a new way to do things, if it makes our writing better.