Accumulating Literacy

May and Randolph and their literacy stories make me want to investigate, sort of drudge up my own literacy story, if I can, out of memory.

When I think of how I learned to read and write, I most often, recently, automatically think of Sesame Street. I think part of that is living with a two-year old, and being reminded of Sesame Street's influence on me. I know the doctors recommend no screen time for kids under two, but in this house, screen time is inevitable. So, I try to at least switch the tube from Calliou to Big Bird if she's even paying attention to the screen, which more than I am proud to admit, she really is.

Okay, me and Sesame Street. I loved watching Sesame Street. I was born in 1977, so I guess The Children's Television Workshop was pretty well-established at the time, and Mr. Roper was alive and kicking. I have this vague remembrance of success in watching Sesame Street and being able to answer literacy questions fast. I don't think we watched a lot of television at daycare in my earliest years, so I think there was less a competitive drive than a mastery drive going on. I can imagine that my mother would heap praise on me if I showed off mastery of the literacy tests administered by Gordon, Ernie, and company. I'm sure my mother read to me and read with me at a very early age, but I can't recall much of those moments. Maybe she taught me to read before I could remember. My father also read to me when I was very small, but I only saw him when he got his visitation weekends or summers. One of the last gifts I gave him was a copy of Going After Carpachiatto, or whatever that Tim O'Brien book is. He used to read me The Hobbit, but I remember how into the story he got and how much fun we had more than the language of the story. My dad would always use fun voices and get really dramatic, and I remember how he would explain things if he thought I might not understand them. (He continued to explain things like that to me past my twenties.) Another early bit of stuff my dad got me into was Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Martian Chronicles. He read me the first couple of books when I was maybe first or second grade, and I read them for myself later in junior high school.

As I moved into grade school, I think literacy remained a mastery drive for me. I wanted to have a sense of control over material I had to read. But there also entered the aspect of being in public to literacy. I can't point out exactly where my motivation changed from mastery to competition, but it was likely between the 1st and 3rd grades. I moved from enjoying praise from a teacher to enjoying beating out my classmates for either highest praise or highest level of mastery of literacy. I can see this now as a social aspect to my desire to attain literacy. And it wasn't limited to language, but spread to all school subjects. I think it was rooted in language, though, because the subjects were all taught in the same language, right?

Thinking of Randolph's grandfather made me think of a time when my own grandfather, my mom's dad, set sort of a literacy precedent. I remember being a kid on Christmas Eve at my grandparents' and wanting to open presents and play with my cousins. My grandpa would shush us up, gather us all around him, and read the Christmas story from the Bible. He didn't read "The Night Before Christmas." He read the King James version of the shepherds and the angels and Nazareth.

May's time in the service and his story of listening to the officers reminded me of working at the Greek restaurant I worked at for five years. There were so many levels of literacy going on in that place. The owners were both Greek immigrants: Soula, the wife, spoke English pretty well, having had to teach her three sons English while she brought them up in America; and Bill, the husband, who enjoyed reading Greek newspapers and seemed to be most at ease talking with Greek friends who came by the restaurant. I remember a time when Bill was trying to take a break from going to the casinos, and he decided to take English lessons. He hired some local teacher who came into the restaurant a lot, and I think she came in to give him some lessons after lunch shifts. I remember him sitting in the back, looking over some workbook. He looked at me and said something like, "I am trying to learn to read English. I read Greek real good, my language." I can imagine Bill feeling resistant to the schooling he was facing, something like what an illiterate adult might feel, although Bill spoke two languages fluently and was a self-made millionaire immigrant and boss of dozens of varying employees of different ages who could probably all read English better than he could. Someone interested in literacy also might be interested in the three kids of my two bosses. They all speak Greek and English. They can read and write Greek, too, I think. They must be some kind of literate in Greek, because they all served a year in the Greek army.
What got me thinking about my time working at that place, though, was thinking of how one of my coworkers was a high school dropout with a different kind of literacy than us college kids who worked there. Sometimes there was maybe some codeswitching going on with us and him, like it might take longer to tell him a story. But then again, he knew buttloads more about fixing cars than I probably ever will. Like I used to say at the restaurant, "It's all Greek to me."

http://www.madisonthecity.com/Chamber/southernliving.htm

Performing Writing, Performing Literaricity

Part Two


It was lovely to read what Beth McGregor had to say about Acting as a Writer. It's like somebody gave a name to what I do sometimes. And now that it has a name, I can call upon it as a tool in my times of need.

One time, back in the good old community college days, I had to write a short paper for an English Lit class. We had the option of either writing a biographical report or writing a fictional interview-type creative thing that included one of a list of literary figures. I chose to write a fictional account of an interview with Keats. How I wrote the thing is the interesting and apropos part. I was out with some friends at one of our older friends' apartment. I knew I had to get this thing written and turned in in maybe two days, so I had my Norton and my notebook and was planning to write it while my friends partied all around me. I never stayed at home nights in community college. After reading the Keats biographical stuff like three times, I found myself narrating out loud in a foppish, learned British accent. My friends played along, laughing and drinking and probably other things besides, and before I knew it, I had British-accent-narrated my way through the project. The final product was not that great, information wise, but it had so much style to it that it didn't matter if it were read with an accent or not. Like Beth, I had act-written my way through a literary project. (Best quote from the paper, Keats's saying "I like horses, but I can't stand surgery.")

It comes back to this idea of persona. Writing fiction gives me lots of practice in developing personae, and finding ways to understand a character that is outside myself, yet produced out of pieces of myself. For illustration I will now change the subject to music.

I was thinking about my alter-ego, my musician stage name personality, Dusty Pyramid. When I write songs, or pretty much just improvise songs for a tape recorder, which is less and less these days but still happens sometimes, I play, sing, and perform as Dusty. This acting as writing is very similar to what McGregor means. It gives me freedom to create and compose in a way that being Jordan just won't allow. Dusty doesn't have to worry about Jordan's problems or concerns, he just gets the compressed diamond of whatever I need to say onto the tape (in place of the page).
I thought about precursors, and I thought about Garth Brooks having to create Chris Gains as an outlet for the pop/R&B persona he never got the chance to use while he was becoming one of the best selling (read:pigeonholed country) recording artists of all time. I thought about how it goes beyond ego or any Freudian terminology, and it gets into what this reading means about audience and what that audience expects from a performer. Garth knew his audience wouldn't stomach a pop album that sounded like Simply Red's outtakes, but he figured out that Chris Gains wouldn't care what Garth's audience expected, Chris would just go and do his own thing.
I also thought about David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, about Elton John, about Elton John and the whole Captain and the Kid thing which just laid it all out there in explanation for the faithful fans. I thought about the first song the Rolling Stones ever wrote, when their producer (I think) forced Mick and Keith to write an original song. What they came up with, the gem of insight and debate the philosophical connotations of which I wrestle with on a monthly basis are said all within the title: "The Singer Not The Song." According to a young Mick Jagger, "It's the singer, not the song."

Maybe eventually it is, but the song has to make folks dance, has to get kids buying records, get patrons buying libations, before the singer even gets remembered. At least that's how it was before American Idol. Davey Archuleta could never have packed Hal & Mal's. Never before the Idol. (I wouldn't recommend that Davey try to book the Hal & Mal's just yet, either, for his own safety.) But hey, contexts evolve, and we can still find artists our daughters aren't into yet. Flip that onto the creative writing front, consider ourselves fifty years old, and things get really interesting. Pan back a bit, and we're discussing composition theory.

Performing Writing, Performing Literaricity

Part One


First, let me jump into using some of the idea of performing writing and performing literacy as happened just lately in my classroom.
Friday, we were discussing one of the assigned readings, having just rejoined as a class from small groups wherein students had been discussing the reading and their reading logs. One of the readings was familiar in form and context to one of the students, and she pretty much gave an impromptu lesson on what a lab report is. I said, oh so you're familiar with the lab report? I've read some in the Writing Center, but I can't remember the last time I would have written one. Yep, she says, I have to read them all the time. I said something like would you share with the class, since it looks like you might be the biggest expert on lab reports in the class. She began by saying yes this is obviously a lab report, and I know because I have to read them all the time. After she gave a brief definition, she went through the reading, making comments at each heading and explaining how this is how people write lab reports and this here is what is usually to be found, although this piece here was a bit different and maybe because of the subject matter, but basically I'm used to reading these and know what to expect, and that's why this is here and that's there, and that's why they gave background information like this, and here's where they will usually do something like Oh exactly that's what they did here. And basically that's why I found this so boring, because it's really so predictable, but I don't find the study boring, or what they're studying; that's interesting to me, but I can understand why so many people in here wouldn't like reading this. She gave this performance so fluidly, so off-the-cuff, that at the end of her spiel, the entire class applauded.
It was not just her display of knowledge, I think, that impressed everyone (myself included). It was also her performance, the way she was so confident in explaining such a specific mode of writing. The lab report is probably a foreign type of thing to half the class (save the nursing students), but she explained it in a way that students could easily understand. And I believe that even if some of the students couldn't keep up with every little thing she was saying, they applauded anyway just based on how forceful and striking her performance was.

This is one of my most outspoken and discussion-contributing students, so I wasn't so surprised that she knew her stuff, or that she would volunteer to explain something for the class. I was a bit surprised at how impromptu and professional her performance was. Maybe she was mad because I busted her text-messaging in class and called her out on it earlier that day. Maybe that fired her up.

The Late, Great Connors, Lunsford Response

The way I put comments on papers is gentle, thoughtful, afraid, hopeful, and even sometimes bordering on the wistful. I do my best to read papers with an open mind, and sometimes have to remind myself to keep my mind open as I read and re-read.
It's difficult sometimes not to read as simply an audience waiting to be entertained, and I think those moments when I am delightedly entertained get marked with comments that reflect my being entertained.

Grading the papers is difficult. It gets more difficult the more I try to theorize why I am giving a certain paper one grade and another paper a different grade. To keep my grading mind focused, I usually keep some tools handy for when I get through with the second, commented-upon read. I keep the assignment sheet and the "grading standards" sheet on hand. I try to put grade emphasis on how well the particular assignment was fulfilled by the paper, looking at how well the audience, purpose, and specific requirements were met with by the paper. After I evaluate how all of those have been fulfilled satisfactorily or not, I can move on to the grading standards sheet, where I have to sort of hold court while my comments and the fulfillment of the assignment's audience/purpose/requirements argue for a placement of the paper into whichever of the grade categories. I do put considerable emphasis on organization, and I think my comments tend to reflect that. Sometimes I do ask, "Could this go here, or that come in earlier, like here?"

Asking questions has become sort of how I not only comment on student papers, but also how I tend to comment on peer drafts in workshop. I think this questions approach helps me let the draft remain the property of the writer, while being able to point out ways it might not have satisfied my expectations as a reader. Much of this approach must come from tutoring so much. It's this idea of informed consent that characterizes how I frame comments, not just in tutoring but in commenting on student papers in a class I get to teach. I don't like the idea of saying "this is wrong, do it this way." I prefer to say things like "what about if we did things a little more this way," and stuff like that. Maybe I sound like I beat around the bush, but specific examples are usually employed to make whatever suggestion I am trying to make, usually something from class, and examples from the NFG and the They Say I Say are great for this purpose.

Recently while tutoring some other 102 teacher's student I noticed and learned that this certain teacher likes to make comments on the reading logs that the students do. One way this was explained to me was that the teacher could point out interesting things in these early prewriting exercises that may eventually come to fruition in a well-developed argument once the paper writing comes around. I have recently started taking up reading logs to comment on, but since I haven't gotten to doing those comments yet, I can't say how successful it will be. I want to be able to keep some kind of track of how the students are doing when it comes to their readings, and I want to keep reminders going for them and for me, that our writing in 102 is a recursive process.

Since beginning to grade student papers last semester, my comments on student papers have varied, according to the paper, but have remained mostly consistent. I don't try to do too much, but certain papers just seem to ask for more out of me, and especially with papers that somehow miss the mark I try to be as detailed as possible. And I do try to stay encouraging. I do find myself making comments about what is going right with papers that fulfill the assignment, make interesting observations, and use the sophisticated moves we have been demystifying. I think students need to know what they are doing right, or well, just as much as they need to know what they are not doing right, or well. It takes time, and even cranking out twenty-three grades in six hours is too much at a time for me. Another teacher of 102 has a system of grading ten per day, which I can appreciate. But appreciating and incorporating are two different things. Sometimes I imagine being able to just read through once and slap a grade on there, but I know I'd probably hate myself. So, I just have to do them as I go, and comment on the great stuff as well as the not so great stuff, and take the time to judge the merits of the paper before the tribunal of me, the assignment, and the grading standards. How can people even survive teaching eight sections of comp in one semester? Not with families of their own, I assume, or with well-considered comments. I guess as I do this grading and commenting thing longer I will get better and faster at it, but I hope to stay thoughtful about the process. "It may sound easy, but nothing could be harder," : Jables, School of Rock.

Welch Response: Textbooks, Schmextbooks

All of these readings seem to reinforce the things we learn in Practicum. I forget that when I misread one of them or get lost and sidetracked like I did with last week's. Welch was easier to follow for me, I think because it felt more readily practical. I like the idea of letting student writing be the primary text for a freshman comp class. I also like someone spelling out for me a definition. The five canons of classical rhetoric was refreshing: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
My reading of this assignment was heavily colored with my own preoccupations with a lit class writing project that I have been stuck spinning my wheels on since, like Tuesday. I'm dealing with two critics, and am supposed to be wrestling with their ideas on the page, or letting them wrestle out their ideas on the page while I act like Marv Albert and tell the reader who is winning. Somehow I am supposed to fit a close reading in there as well. One of the critics seems to take an approach similar to what Welch calls the dominant composition ideology. This critic, Fairer, seems really into the tradition of the pastoral and only lets himself praise a poet when the poet does something technically advanced or stylistically inventive in a poem. The other critic, Feingold, seems to take a more Welch-friendly approach to lit crit, going after an understanding of the social and political context of a poem in order to evaluate the poet not only stylistically, but morally within that context. My problem with the assignment (besides getting started so late on it that I couldn't ask any questions until it was already late), is that I feel like I am supposed to leave my own opinion at the door and bow to these critics before I am allowed to talk about what I am interested in. I should be able to draw on this experience of mine to be a better teacher. Welch: "Teaching writing means enabling writers to compose out of lived experience."
Keeping writing active, not passive, and keeping an energy level going about and with language are very interesting to me. Tiffany N. told me last week about how she got her students to write down pick-up lines in class, and they examined them as pieces of rhetoric. Keeping something like that going in some way, some exciting approach to language, is a new goal of mine for every class day.
I loooove the idea of appetite, p 275. My trouble with my own assignments comes out of that area sometimes.
San Dimas High School Football Rules!

Devitt Response

Okay, I'm blogging from Biloxi, so my situation might affect the text, as the genre "constructs the situation and the situation constructs the genre."

Devitt makes some kind of point early on in "Generalizing about Genre" that lots of dichotomies too often define us (who we are and what we do). She goes holistic: "relating toor concerned with wholes or with complete systems rather than with the analysis of, treatment of, or dissection into parts —ho·lis·ti·cal·ly /-ti-k(&-)lE/ adverb"
(Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary, © 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc). And I get a bit confused about what her motivations are in moving towards this "unified view of writing" (573) and why she wants to move toward this "integrated, unified theory of writing" (584). I understand that she wants to convince me that the reconception of genre is important and can help Composition scholars eventually "capture the essence of writing" (584). But I am bogged down in her discussion by the abstract concepts which to her are second nature, something I can imagine being like the basic and semi-automatic she brings in from Flower and Hayes. So, to get beyond my own ignorant resistance and to speak on the points brought up in the Devitt text, let me investigate/speculate why she has a problem with dichotomies in the first place.

What are the advantages to studying an animal holistically? Can I know all about it? How about a raccoon, for example? Let's say I study raccoons and teach Raccoon 101/102/333? I need to know all about raccoons, right? I need to know all about the different parts that make up Raccoon Studies. I need to know raccoon biology, raccoon physiology, raccoon sociology, raccoon habitat, raccoon migratory patterns, raccoons versus skunks, the effects of cat food on raccoons, etc., in order to come to some unified theory about raccoons. What would be the advantage for me as a raccoon theorist to separate all the different kinds of raccoon studies? They all affect each other and overlap. But some raccoon experts might specialize in certain areas. These specialists might have stumbled into their specialities out of a need to fill in the blanks in the research field. If the field was already saturated with studies about raccoon social behavior, I might have to carve out my own niche in the speciality of raccoons versus opposums for resources and habitat. Not that I am not interested in the raccoon as a whole, but to help draw a better picture and form a more complete understanding of the raccoon as an animal, I have had to research raccoons and opossums for the last three years.

Now I think of Dr. Walcher's focus on Error. And I can see how he may have chosen a particular facet of Composition studies that may have been both open to new research and of particular interest to him. And I can understand how investigating a smaller part may improve the understanding of the larger whole. Then I realize that Composition studies is evolving much faster than the raccoon, and that complicates my attempt at understanding through metaphor, but complicated is not ruined.

I am trying to follow Devitt's idea that encouraging dichotomies is destructive. For example, she says that "Treating genre as form requires dividing form from content" (574), when she wants to believe that "Form and content in discourse are one." I am probably oversimplifying and generalizing, but is Devitt saying that Homogeneity is Desired for the purposes of achieving a Unified Theory of Writing? Isn't such a unified theory ultimately impossible due to the dynamic and evolutionary qualities of human discourse? Is Devitt truly after some unified theory of writing that may inform how we teach composition to freshman students in order to provide them with the power of reading and writing critically so that they may benefit in their lives/careers from our instruction? In other words, is Devitt after a Practical Resonance to her approach to Genre, as in "When we create assignments and as we evaluate responses to them, we must consider both their situational and generic demands" (583)? Or is she writing about writing, and about thinking and talking about writing, in a way that further discourages an implementational understanding of writing? Does Devitt really want to "capture the essence of writing" (584)? Or does it profit her better to keep it a mystery, an abstract and ever-changing dynamic animal, much more complicated than any raccoon?

I am probably conflating dichotomies with specialized fields. I don't want to come across as unsympathetic in my reading, but I do want to engage Devitt critically, and the dichotomy thing seemed an easy place to start.

My favorite sentence of Devitt's is "Writers work creatively within the frame of past texts and given genres just as they work within the frame of a given language" (579). She's working with analogy here! I would have liked her to use more colorful stuff like that. If I were her pal and was trying to help her get this published in Atlantic Monthly or something, I would have urged her to color up the text with more metaphors and some better imagery or examples, to supplement/complement the dry approach to abstracts. Genre, situation, audience, clarity, entertain?

Feedback would be nice. If any of my Valued Readers can find mistakes in my thinking, or thinks I have missed something in my reading or left something important out of my response, please Respond to
This Humble Blogger,
Jordanimo Rex

Response Blog: Hesse

This Hesse article was kind of a reminder of last semester. It reminded me of our pleasant little berating at the beginning of last semester. So I read this Hesse with having an open mind in mind. But maybe I read it with too much of an open mind, since I don’t really know what I think about the article. Being in the “reflexive position” that Hesse points out is hard to imagine as being so “wonderfully reflexive” while I am in the middle of it. I guess I need to think about my students more as I read this article. What do they want or need from me? Do they really want me to help them make informed decisions about writing, are the ideas about writing that I bring to the tutoring table the same ideas I bring to the Composition classroom?
So as not to pursue this questioning of my own validity as a teacher of writing, maybe I should switch gears and talk about how I am trying to build up the self-concepts of validity of my students. I now begin class by saying, “Hello, writers!” The first time I did this, on last Wednesday, one of my students from last semester said, “Writers?” and sort of looked around like he might be among a secret group of writers who could at any time attack him with writing. “You’re all writers,” I said. “We are all writers.” I went on to explain how I thought (since Practicum Fall Semester, I didn’t tell them that part) that all writing was valid and useful in its own context, and I led a discussion about different genres of writing and the different conventions used in different genres.
I am thinking that as I do the readings along with the students, I will have a very much informed idea of what Hesse means when he refers to the “wonderfully reflexive position.” We have to have material to write about in Composition. And we are working with materials that share the common theme of fear. Reading the materials while the students read will give me a decent view from the inside like Hesse mentions. Maybe I should have already told the students how difficult some of the readings may be at first, but I haven’t really made up my mind on that one. Maybe they need to just crash and burn on the first assignment, so that they’ll start taking the work seriously. But then I think that is kind of mean to let them struggle, when I could have just given them a preview/warning. I think if I suggest reading study groups, then plagiaristic collaboration wouldn’t be too far away, so I don’t think I will do that. It’s going to be an interesting semester, for sure.