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