...Constructing and is constructed by...by and by
Okay, this is that blog that you've all been waiting for. You want me, the anti-comp champion to comment on the composition/rhetoric program at UMass Amherst. I know you do. You want me to make a pointed discussion of how these people have their heads in the clouds and how their concerns never address the practicality of teaching writing. You want me to bash social constructionism, post colonialism, post modernism, and all that good stuff. You know that you want me to, just admit it.
But I can't.
Truth be told, my long standing opinion of composition studies was that it invited a certain type of person into its fold. A sort of glass jawed, soft under bellied, fascist liberal--the type of person for whom political correctness is the very cornerstone of our society without which we would all resort back to a position of feces throwing apes--the type of person who tells you that all of your beliefs are simply products of your environment as if anyone who holds themselves to certain tenuous ideas as...oh, I don't know...morality, spirituality, a sense of belonging have all simply been brainwashed into holding such conditions as important--the type of person who spits on the idea of greatness and suggests that we accept all things from Shakespeare to this blog here as having equal claim to genius; that the very idea of genius is simply a product of our society, and that if tables were turned, if the cultural conditions were different....blah, blah, blah.
God, I hate those people.
Well, anyways, that was Chico. Amherst is pretty much different. In Chico, I was asked to teach Foucalt to freshman. In Amherst, a reason given for a standard set of reading amongst the hundred or so teachers of Freshman English was, and I quote, "to prevent teachers from going crazy and trying to give Derrida to freshman." Do you see the difference, pun intended?
In Chico, I was expected to ingest huge theoretical concepts which I was then to repeat back to prove that I had learned what it was to be a good teacher. Actual classroom experiences were frowned upon. An example of advice for teaching at Chico would be something like this: "we must realize that the students, as much as we wish they wouldn't, will write from the context of a contact zone between the academic world they hope to inhabit, and whose rules they have yet to internalize, the academy itself, which often thrives by marginalizing the students otherness in relation to itself, the authority of the teacher, which despite your best intentions you will embody, and their many contexts which construct them outside of class. We have to, after all, realize that our students have an existence outside of school and, so do not always exist as students qua students. Also, our students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds which inform them as to their role within the university."
Try to use that as a guideline for what you should do in your class. I mean, just try to think of a situation where what I've just written actually has some effect on what you, as a teacher, are actually going to do.
Now back to Amherst. While it was clear that our supervisors knew this type of rhetorical solipsism, they did not employ it. They were constantly using real examples: this is what you're going to do, because this is what we do--not, this is what we're going to do, though we know that it might violate some of our student's expectations of the cultural contexts of the academy, and though we understand that we are, in many ways, stepping into the teacher/student relation which deviates from the student centered learning model to which we hope to aspire.
At Amherst, they asked questions like: "what will you do when you have an 18 year old girl, one of your students, in front of you crying because you won't raise her grade? Will you be able to stand by your policy in that situation?" In short, the training centered around real world classroom experiences that we are likely to find ourselves in, and not the Foucaldian Panoptic model of relations inside the academy.
I'd like to add that no part of teacher training at Chico state ever actually helped me with anything that ever happened in my classrooms, and as such, when I finally taught composition at Butte, I was pretty much making it up as I went along. But here at Amherst, I'd say I've learned how to teach composition in such a way as that I can now look back at my past mistakes and see what it is that I was doing wrong. It's this retrospection that you have to have in order to improve, and it was this very thing that was lacking at Chico. We never looked back, rather we looked into various texts designed to teach teachers to teach teachers. They had very little to do with teaching students.
So, what's the same? Well, I still have to swallow my tongue when the subject of "good writing" comes up. The party line there hasn't changed whatsoever; it is still that there is no such thing as "good writing" but rather "good writing inside of a context." That will always chafe me, because I am a literature student, and the study of literature rests on the basis that some writing is good and some is not. That very delineation makes up 90% of literature arguments.
At Amherst, however, this refusal to argue quality is downplayed. At Chico, half of what we were expected to teach was this lack of a definition of "good writing." At Amherst, we've moved on. "Okay, so it's hard to define what good writing is. Fine. Are there things that we know successful writers do, and can we teach our students to do those things?" So, I'm teaching proofreading, and how to make a habit of writing in a journal, and how to do generative writing, as opposed to, say, how to identify cultural contexts which remodel and redefine one's identity as a student.
It still amazes me how people trying to free you from the brainwashing you have received since your birth from the culture in which you live, say the same things over and over and over and over like a water torture. "Yes, you're right. I do think less of illiterate people because of what society tells me to think. Now, which bank should me and Patti Hearst knock over?" I'm glad to say that I am no longer in that business. I was never very good at in the first place.
But I can't.
Truth be told, my long standing opinion of composition studies was that it invited a certain type of person into its fold. A sort of glass jawed, soft under bellied, fascist liberal--the type of person for whom political correctness is the very cornerstone of our society without which we would all resort back to a position of feces throwing apes--the type of person who tells you that all of your beliefs are simply products of your environment as if anyone who holds themselves to certain tenuous ideas as...oh, I don't know...morality, spirituality, a sense of belonging have all simply been brainwashed into holding such conditions as important--the type of person who spits on the idea of greatness and suggests that we accept all things from Shakespeare to this blog here as having equal claim to genius; that the very idea of genius is simply a product of our society, and that if tables were turned, if the cultural conditions were different....blah, blah, blah.
God, I hate those people.
Well, anyways, that was Chico. Amherst is pretty much different. In Chico, I was asked to teach Foucalt to freshman. In Amherst, a reason given for a standard set of reading amongst the hundred or so teachers of Freshman English was, and I quote, "to prevent teachers from going crazy and trying to give Derrida to freshman." Do you see the difference, pun intended?
In Chico, I was expected to ingest huge theoretical concepts which I was then to repeat back to prove that I had learned what it was to be a good teacher. Actual classroom experiences were frowned upon. An example of advice for teaching at Chico would be something like this: "we must realize that the students, as much as we wish they wouldn't, will write from the context of a contact zone between the academic world they hope to inhabit, and whose rules they have yet to internalize, the academy itself, which often thrives by marginalizing the students otherness in relation to itself, the authority of the teacher, which despite your best intentions you will embody, and their many contexts which construct them outside of class. We have to, after all, realize that our students have an existence outside of school and, so do not always exist as students qua students. Also, our students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds which inform them as to their role within the university."
Try to use that as a guideline for what you should do in your class. I mean, just try to think of a situation where what I've just written actually has some effect on what you, as a teacher, are actually going to do.
Now back to Amherst. While it was clear that our supervisors knew this type of rhetorical solipsism, they did not employ it. They were constantly using real examples: this is what you're going to do, because this is what we do--not, this is what we're going to do, though we know that it might violate some of our student's expectations of the cultural contexts of the academy, and though we understand that we are, in many ways, stepping into the teacher/student relation which deviates from the student centered learning model to which we hope to aspire.
At Amherst, they asked questions like: "what will you do when you have an 18 year old girl, one of your students, in front of you crying because you won't raise her grade? Will you be able to stand by your policy in that situation?" In short, the training centered around real world classroom experiences that we are likely to find ourselves in, and not the Foucaldian Panoptic model of relations inside the academy.
I'd like to add that no part of teacher training at Chico state ever actually helped me with anything that ever happened in my classrooms, and as such, when I finally taught composition at Butte, I was pretty much making it up as I went along. But here at Amherst, I'd say I've learned how to teach composition in such a way as that I can now look back at my past mistakes and see what it is that I was doing wrong. It's this retrospection that you have to have in order to improve, and it was this very thing that was lacking at Chico. We never looked back, rather we looked into various texts designed to teach teachers to teach teachers. They had very little to do with teaching students.
So, what's the same? Well, I still have to swallow my tongue when the subject of "good writing" comes up. The party line there hasn't changed whatsoever; it is still that there is no such thing as "good writing" but rather "good writing inside of a context." That will always chafe me, because I am a literature student, and the study of literature rests on the basis that some writing is good and some is not. That very delineation makes up 90% of literature arguments.
At Amherst, however, this refusal to argue quality is downplayed. At Chico, half of what we were expected to teach was this lack of a definition of "good writing." At Amherst, we've moved on. "Okay, so it's hard to define what good writing is. Fine. Are there things that we know successful writers do, and can we teach our students to do those things?" So, I'm teaching proofreading, and how to make a habit of writing in a journal, and how to do generative writing, as opposed to, say, how to identify cultural contexts which remodel and redefine one's identity as a student.
It still amazes me how people trying to free you from the brainwashing you have received since your birth from the culture in which you live, say the same things over and over and over and over like a water torture. "Yes, you're right. I do think less of illiterate people because of what society tells me to think. Now, which bank should me and Patti Hearst knock over?" I'm glad to say that I am no longer in that business. I was never very good at in the first place.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home