5369: Reading Responses 9/1

In case you're wondering, this is my blog from 5060 last year, cleverly repurposed because I don't have time to set up something else at the moment.

Brunge

I’m amused that Bunge puts psychoanalysis on the same level as astrology, alchemy, and garbage-in-garbage-out computing. But that’s neither here nor there.

Reading this piece is actually fairly shocking after a year of authors who take ideas like the social construction of knowledge for granted. In trying to describe a philosophy of technology, Bunge apparently intends to use his concept of the technological worldview as a transformative algorithm: he punches in classical philosophical questions and describes the output. Thus he gives us the epistemology, metaphysics, value orientation, and ethics of technology. It’s a thoroughly modernist thought experiment, and it’s hard to imagine that Bunge did not realize how much his own assumptions fed the process.

I almost wonder if that was, in a way, the point. It’s come up in both my other classes this semester that members of applied science communities have tended to be among the most resistant to postmodern accounts of knowledge and language, particularly that language creates knowledge. Surely technology, which allows us to reshape the world around us in beneficial and predictable ways, is a safe bastion from all that social constructionist nonsense that gives all that formative power to words. Bunge even remarks that metaphysics, discredited in philosophy proper, finds a home among technologists (177). Since technology is cutting-edge, and since he can attribute his positions to technology, his positions must not be obsolete, at least not where they really matter.

Ellul

I first encountered the idea of technological determinism last year in Foundations of Tech Comm. At the time, I didn’t think I quite understood it. I’m still not sure I fully do, but Ellul’s definitions help.

Ellul offers an interesting sociological account of human history in the twin ideas of technique and determinism. Technique is, in summary, the sum of practical human knowledge that describes the best way we know how to get by. Determinism describes the structures and forces, however complex, that compel humanity as a species or a community in a certain historical direction. However, rather than casting these forces as primarily external, Ellul links technique and determinism, as the sociological structures that the human race develops inevitably influence and interpret human decisions. As technique changes through human history, so do the various determinants that shape human actions. Ellul views technological progress as deterministic in itself; unchecked, it will drive the human race toward an inevitable end, the one he presumably describes in the rest of his book. However, individual humans may resist the determinants forced upon them, or at least they may choose among the forces that determine their actions. This, for Ellul, is the concept of freedom.

Shrader-Frechette

This treatment of technology and ethics is short but thought-provoking. Shrader-Frechette begins, appropriately, with the Aristotelian notion that new capabilities raise new ethical questions, and it is the newness of technology that chiefly drives her inquiry into ethical positions on it. What are the ethical responsibilities of a society plunging headlong into new technologies which are, by definition, unknown? How is it ethical to weigh risks and benefits when we cannot even begin to quantify those risks and benefits (and is a risk-benefit analysis appropriate in such a situation)? When dealing with dangerous technology, what constitutes informed consent concerning occupational (or residential) hazards when understanding those hazards requires advanced and esoteric training? While this article is only introductory, it serves as an effective introduction to some of the more nebulous areas of technology and ethics.

This draft has committed an illegal operation - brain must be shut down.

There are times when I really struggle with what I can possibly say to help a student on a draft. Sometimes I can't even begin to connect with the cognitive processes involved... and usually it's not on the worst drafts, which generally have easily identifiable flaws. Usually it's on drafts that have a thesis statement... if a little muddled... and they've used their sources... if slightly out-of-context... and there's a structure to their arguments... if fuzzy... but there's something about their technically correct but obtuse language, their logical leaps, and their unrealistic applications that completely confounds everything I know about writing.

I can't connect to the cognitive processes going on - I might be able to imagine how the student could have thought it sort of made sense, but the problem is that the dysfunction isn't one of writing technique - it's one of thought, and they've followed their flawed thought processes so far on so many levels I can't even begin to chart a course back to sanity. It causes a visceral reaction, and I'm not speaking metaphorically, nor out of antipathy toward the students; I am actually nauseated by the feeling of my own cognitive dissonance when I run into such papers.

These are the drafts that take me upwards of an hour, an hour and a half, to grade. I try to address lack of clarity in their thesis, and yet there's a consistency to their lack of clarity that suggests it won't be fixed just by pointing it out. I start writing about how their argument isn't sufficiently organized, only to realize that there is an organization scheme, but it hurts my mind to contemplate it and trying to find where it goes wrong is like trying to follow a mobius strip of fallacies and uneven comparisons, most of which I don't even have a name for, and, even if I did, the student certainly doesn't. The paper is barely legible, not because of a host of spelling and grammatical errors, but because words are used in not quite the right way and the ideas aren't quite coherent. I can express my complaints, but not in a way that sounds at all nice, and if I tried to enumerate the ways it breaks down, I'd be writing a dissertation.

And yet, through it all, I can see how the student followed the assignment and how the argument has some level of logic, and I need to find a way to specifically justify the grade I'm giving, which usually turns out to be a C. But I can't shake the feeling that any constructive advice I could give will be just as unintelligible to the student as the student's work is to me. And if I can't figure out how to fix their problems, how are they going to figure it out from my commentary?

Maybe this is the sort of student who thrives on free-writing, I don't know. Perhaps these drafts are a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing. All I know is that my mind does not fit that mold. I'm sure my personality makes this worse for me than it generally is for other people. On some level, I think my mind so naturally seeks structure that I don't know how to teach it.

Dr. Lang advised me to find the one point where a draft breaks down and focus on that rather than try to address everything in a draft. That's helped me a lot, and I've started to whittle down my average grading time. But I still don't know what to do when I can't locate the problem, when the incoherence is so thoroughly developed and universally integrated into the writing.

This is what frightens me the most about becoming a composition teacher. How do I connect to students when their thought processes appear so fundamentally muddled? How do I get over this phobia of incoherence and actually help these students become more articulate? How do I even name this problem - and it is their problem or mine?

Shh! I'm decomposing.

I did some composing today for the first time in about two months. It really felt good.

No, I don't mean writing - I've been doing plenty of that for class (though not enough for this blog, obviously). I mean composing music. I own Sonar Home Studio 6 XL, a software package published by Cakewalk. I have no instrumental talent, so I write MIDI. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, MIDI is a way of coding music. You create the score and then the computer performs it for you using sampled instruments. If you have a good sample library - and the Garritan Pocket Orchestra isn't bad - you can make the music sound pretty convincingly real.

Music is one of my three creative outlets - writing and drawing are the others (okay, drama makes four, but it's not something I can do on my own). In my last post, I wrote about my experience with free-writing. I also talked with Dr. Rickly about it, and she seemed just as surprised as some of my commenters when I voiced my difficulties. It got me thinking about my creative process in general, not just for writing. Maybe looking at how I write music can help me nail down how I write.

Just as with writing, any piece of music must start with an idea - a musical statement. It doesn't have to be complex. Today's musical exercise started with two ascending chords on a harp. That was all. I'd been thinking about music today, but otherwise, I have no idea where they came from. But it was a simple texture, open and wistful. I played the chords over and over in my head until a melody on a flute started to join them. That's when I opened a session in Sonar and began to write.

I can play music in my head, you see. Not just the tune, but the whole arrangement. If I don't have my MP3 player with me, I'll play the Imperial March or "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - anything I'm intimately familiar with. I do it when I'm composing, too - just like I form sentences in my head before writing them. The problem is that the music is very ephemeral. It plays much faster than I can possibly write it down, and much of it gets lost, especially because as I hear what Sonar is playing back to me, it crowds out the musical image in my mind.

A lot of the music I write doesn't get past the first stanza of the melody. Sometimes it doesn't get that far. Maybe the idea wasn't as promising as I thought. Maybe I realize it's too close to something I've heard before. Most often I just can't find another passage to connect to it. Music is not a field of infinite possibility. It is structurally interdependent. The sound must be balanced. The voices can't all be clustered in the same tone range, or it'll sound muddy. If you bring in a secondary melody, it has to somehow echo the first. It's like a huge, multidimensional puzzle, only you have to create all the pieces from scratch. I'm constantly playing out new scenarios in my head, trying it out, erasing it, and starting again. When it comes together, it's exhilarating.

Writing is not infinitely open, either. It, too, must follow a logic and an aesthetic that goes beyond the rules of simple theory. It takes not just a mechanical understanding of the process but an ear for language; while there are many ways I could end this sentence, some solutions just aren't right. Furthermore, what I write two, three, four sentences from now depends a great deal on what I write in this sentence. I am constantly evaluating my options as I write, playing out scenarios and planning ahead like a chess player to try to corner that idea two or three moves in advance.

It's not that I have the whole paper planned from the beginning - far from it. Usually I rush into my paper with a fairly scanty outline, sometimes just with a handful of ideas in mind. It can be nerve-racking, especially when there's a deadline bearing down on me, and I settle more often than I would like for "good enough." But then there are those moments when all the pieces of the puzzle fall in the right places, and I start rocking my task chair in excitement.

I had that sort of moment today when writing my music - that open, solitary texture of the harp and flute was joined by the woodwind section and a few airy strings, and then, with a ferocity that surprised me, the entire string section took over, that dramatic wall-to-wall orchestral sound that you feel vibrating in your sternum. The countermelody transformed the piece. It is no longer just a small, searching melody but a dialogue between the plaintive flute and the soaring strings. Already I have broad ideas for how the piece will continue - another passage of the flute, followed by a dramatic climax and a gradual decrescendo into nothingness.

But I'm in the wrong key now, and I need to figure out how to get back. If you see me staring off into space and conducting with one hand as I walk around campus this week, you'll know what I'm doing.

This is why I'm not an expressivist.

We've had some interesting discussions about free-writing as a tool to pull students out of the self-conscious paralysis of the blank page and to get them expressing their ideas without worrying about grammar, form, and organization. Dr. Rickley in particular had some great examples of students who turned in the blandest, most institutional essays imaginable but metamorphosed when they were prompted to write off the top of their heads on something they really cared about.

And I maintain that free-writing exercises have never helped me one bit.

Give me a ten-minute free-write, and it'll usually go something like this: I'll write the first sentence that occurs to me. Then I'll stare at it for two minutes. I'll want to change something about it, but I know I'm not supposed to. I'll have an idea, but I can't quite connect it to the first sentence, so it doesn't coagulate. We're five minutes in now, and I finally come up with a connecting thought between the first and second sentences, and the organization clicks into place. I finish out the paragraph with the other thoughts that have been swimming around looking for a home, but then I realize I'm still really just introducing the topic. Time is up, and I have an introductory paragraph for an idea I may or may not have any investment in, but, chances are, this violence against my customary writing process has turned me off.

I simply cannot write without prewriting. I can't separate composition from organization. If my ideas aren't organized in some way, I can't express them.

I know free-writing doesn't mean writing without thought, but you could have fooled me from how my elementary and junior-high teachers talked about it. I honestly came away with the impression that they expected something meaningful to effortlessly come out on the page as long as my pencil was moving. I spent so much of those free-writing exercises bashing my head against what I thought they expected from me that I barely had any time to write at all - I ended up concluding that free-writing was just a colossal waste of time.

I'm not certain whether free-writing is something that is just at odds with my cognitive processes or whether I just never learned to do it right. There are certainly times I know I have ideas but don't have a framework for them, and I wish I had a way of just dumping them onto the page and picking through them and shuffling them around like those refrigerator poetry magnets, but I'm so hardwired to try to form connections any time I'm writing things in sequence that I feel almost physically restrained from doing so. I am an obsessive-compulsive writer.

In class, I was the only person to mention having had difficulty with free-writing. Most of the other people who talked about it at all did so in glowing terms. That seems to suggest to me that I'm in the minority. I certainly expect that most of the 1301 students don't have the same sorts of perfectionistic roadblocks that I have - they're going to have different roadblocks.

Which leads me to wonder how I'm going to be able to use free-writing in my class. If I struggle with it, how am I going to be able to help students who have never encountered it before? If there will be students in my classroom for whom free-writing is the catalyst they've always needed, how am I going to provide that, and how can I tell the difference between those who just need a little more prompting and those, like me, who just aren't connecting with the idea?

And on the subject, I'm not going to assume that there's no one else with the same problem. How do I deal with students whose problem isn't that they don't know how to express themselves but that they just need time to do so? How do I overcome the artificiality of the "write without thinking" prompts I got in junior high? How do I avoid embittering another generation of perfectionists while hopefully encouraging them to loosen up a little?

One thing that I definitely think needs to go is the VAGUE PROMPTS. "Write about something that makes you feel happy. Look out the window and start writing about what you see. Tell me about the person you would like to be in twenty years." Either they were telling us to write about nothing at all or giving us a topic so broad and so daunting any attempt I could offer in ten minutes would be trivial. These sorts of hazy ideas don't spark my creative process; they paralyze it. Give me something constructive to do, something to respond to, a starting point, a context where I can at least find some anchor points for the structure my mind insists on building.

I can sort of identify with the poor poetry student who couldn't get his head around metaphor. I don't have a problem with the literary device, but I do have a problem when it works its way into instructions. Tell me to write without thinking, and I will reply, "vwe.aEIGES>gdflgna;oEWO;n>sdg:OiEWSREDL:kfdgslkjsD."

Because, come on. Even free-writing is about learning to think.

The Wasteland: Part Two

My own freshman composition experience was a drag. It was literally no more challenging than the one-month composition course I had been required to take as a sophomore in high school.

We had a textbook. I don't remember much about it because I mostly didn't bother to read it, and when I did, I didn't find it helpful. Grammar was never a problem for me, and I turned in the weekly grammar exercises as a matter of busywork.

We had three writing assignments. The first was to summarize and critique an article. The second was to write a single-source essay (we were confined to one source, but our topic was not to be the same topic as the source essay - I never understood why you would write such a monstrosity outside of a course requirement). The final assignment was a more traditional research paper, but, out of a fear of plagiarism, we could only use the twelve articles in the back of the textbook (on the bioethics of genetic science) as sources.

It was like the entire course was structured to promote laziness. I schlepped through with a modicum of effort. The final paper was the only assignment that took me more than one sitting to write. When my professor complimented me on my work and recommended that I look into working at the writing center, I thought (perhaps unfairly), "Based on this? Just how low are your standards, anyway?"

Looking back on it, I realize that I'm as much to blame as the professor or the curriculum for not getting anything out of that course. I went in expecting the class to be useless to me, and it was. If I had taken it as a challenge to learn something useful, to build good writing habits on my own, to go beyond the requirements, it probably would have benefited me a great deal. I've posted elsewhere that I feel my writing habits are pretty poor and that I continue to struggle with the barrier of the blank page even in short-form assignments like reading responses.

But I have to think there is a potential, even at the freshman level of composition, to challenge students' ideas about writing as a process, as a discipline, as an art, as a discourse. Most students (I know I did) view their writing as secondary or tertiary material, commenting on primary sources but unable to question them, synthesizing the ideas of others but unable to advance any of their own, as far outside the academic discussion as anything can possibly be, and ultimately of no use whatsoever outside the class requirements. It is almost like medieval scholasticism where the authoritative canon is sacrosanct; students may compare the authorities, favor some over others, but they can never consider entering the discourse as an equal.

Obviously, most students at the undergraduate level aren't capable of holding their own in an advanced academic discussion where most of the participants have a decade or more of research to validate their publications. But the conceptual disconnect is not so much one of degree - I haven't reached that plateau yet - but one of kind - I am not an academic and therefore have nothing to say. Students have a sense that their own writing is powerless and trivial, not because they have not learned how to express great ideas, but because they are students.

A curriculum like the one I experienced more often than not serves to reinforce that conception. As a result, I didn't even bother to take my writing for that course seriously, and I couldn't take my professor's feedback seriously. My question for this class is this: how do we give our students a sense of their own potential without patronizing them? How do we manage their progress without stifling them?

The Wasteland (part one)

"Freshman English is also frequently invoked as an empty space notable for its various lacks, as an absence. According to Crowley (1986), 'When teachers of English write about the course in their professional journals it is to complain about it: its teachers' lack of training and motivation; its students' ill-preparedness and lack of motivation; its low status; its lack of intellectual integrity' (11). Crowley, herself, remarks on the [sic] 'the intellectual poverty' of 'the ordinary unproductive vineyards of freshman English' (14-15). For Stade, freshman English is 'singularly devoid of either the profitable or the playful,... has no content at all... [and] is not a subject' (144-145). Moreover, Greenbaum argues, freshman English is a course designed 'to develop in the student an overwhelming sense of his own inadequacies.' It is, he writes, the place 'where a person learns that he can't write,' and it thus serves as 'the crown on thirteen hapless years of composition education that has taken expressive children and molded them into wordless adults' (186)."

Heilker, Paul. "Freshman English." Keywords in Composition Studies. Ed. Paul Heilker, and Peter Vandenberg. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1996. 108-109.

A quick note to my fellow T.A.'s: if you haven't yet read the keyword article on freshman English, do so. It contains a brief overview of scholarly writing on the phenomenon of freshman composition courses. Most of the statements are very negative, like the above quotation, but they illuminate some very real problems with the perception and process of these classes that can interfere with or even undermine the benefits we hope to impart. These criticisms demand a frank evaluation of our curricula, our teaching philosophies, and our expectations for our students, and they similarly demand an intentional response in our practice as teachers of writing.

I selected the passage above because it seemed to me the most damning of the whole article. Freshman English is most notable as a rhetorical void, a course of study that has no content but demands a product; its products, even if structurally sound, are empty of content, significance, and meaningful self-expression. Its classroom is characterized as a gathering place for apathy, inadequacy, and intellectual barrenness (or even dishonesty). Worse, it is part of a larger educational framework whose end result is to quash expressiveness and real rhetorical literacy.

This is why I think we should suspend all 1301 and 1302 classes immediately.

Wait, what was that? Graduate assistantship? Darn.

What I mean to say was that it bears examination whether our classrooms individually or the Texas Tech composition program as an institution fosters the sort of rhetorical stupor that Crowley, Stade, Greenbaum, and many others identify with freshman writing classes. The one thing we absolutely cannot control - not without convincing the university to gouge the enrollment, which doesn't really solve anything - is the quality of our students, or, more to the point, the quality of their education in composition to the point they enter our classrooms. We know that the most exceptional students will generally test out of 1301 and 1302, but that still leaves us with an incredible range in student aptitude. Some will enter deservedly confident of their writing skills and may be skeptical that we have anything to offer them at this level. Others will essentially need remedial training to bring their verbal skills up to college standards.

I think the greatest source of strength in Texas Tech's approach to freshman composition is the high degree of specific, individual attention it fosters. How? By placing assignment commentary on a similar level of importance to the classroom instruction itself. The two cannot be separated; they are both integral parts of our students' education, and each serves the other intimately. This is why it is so crucial that our classroom instructors and document instructors stay on the same page regarding their points of emphasis and standards of evaluation. It also means that we must take our role as commentators at least as seriously as our role as graders. We must demonstrate to our students that we truly do care about their progress as writers and that such progress is attainable, or we cannot reasonably expect them to care.

I was going to address the content of our classes as well, but this post is becoming an essay, and I have other things to do this morning. Perhaps I'll save that for a later post. My purpose here, more than anything, is simply to provoke some thought, reflection, and criticism; I certainly don't think that I can solve or even fully understand the many problems pursuant to freshman composition programs. But the greatest danger for us teachers, as I see it, is an unreflective approach.

The singular anomaly, the freshman plagiarist (they'd none of them be missed, they'd none of them be missed)

As a first-time grader, one of the potential problems that most concerned me was the issue of plagiarism - both how to recognize it and how to deal with it.

I really didn't expect to encounter it on the very first brief I graded.

I decided to tackle one of the Extended Studies assignments since the Brief #1's were only just trickling in, and they wouldn't provide much grading challenge anyway. The assignment I drew was about evaluating sources: examining the credentials of the author and the publication as well as the validity of the content.

The student had evaluated two sources. After my first read-through, my impression was that the student hadn't fully followed the directions, though he or she had done an exceptional job of listing the first author's credentials.

So exceptional that I had to give it another look. A quick Google search confirmed that the three biographical sentences had been lifted verbatim from the end of a book review.

Unfortunately, the flagging system is still being retooled, so I couldn't send it back to the instructor, and I had already saved my comments, so I couldn't return it to the top of the queue and grade something else. I finished my comments, included a link to the plagiarized article, and issued a stern warning about plagiarism. Then I docked the student severely in the final grade.

But I wasn't certain if I had quite handled the grade correctly. A few possibilities had occurred to me - give a zero for the assignment. Take fifty points off the top - a zero for the first evaluation. Take twenty-five points off the top - half credit for the first evaluation. In the end, I took the last option, which may have been too nice. With the rest of the assignment's flaws, it would have been mid-to-low-C range if it had been all the student's work; the penalty dropped it squarely to a failing grade.

Since I'm just starting out, I'm sure I'm going to make plenty of mistakes. But my goal is to learn from them. In any other class, those three sentences would have been enough to award the student a zero and an after-class conference; if they appeared in a final paper, the consequences could be even worse. But ostensibly one of the skills we're teaching in 1301 and 1302 is how to synthesize information from a variety of sources without plagiarizing. In which case it may not have been a conscious attempt to cheat - it may be just another error, albeit a serious one, but an error like a comma splice or a sentence fragment.

I would be inclined to give a student the benefit of the doubt, especially when the rest of the assignment shows evidence of less-than-stellar compositional skills. And then still level a stiff penalty to show the student that we really mean business. They need to understand that turning in their own bad work is infinitely better than turning in someone else's.

So here I'm asking for other people's input. Was I too nice by dropping what would have been a 69 to a 44? Should it have gone down to a 19 or a zero? Or, confronted with such a clear case of plagiarism, should I have waited to be sure the flag system was working or until I had contacted Dr. Lang to ask her advice?

I eagerly await your responses.