Heh

I just got an email inviting me to apply to be the Dean of the department I work in. I'd be pretty darn tempted if I were just a little older and not in school. It would guarantee me a job after next term, after all, and in that way it's a little like me peeing a circle around my continuing employment (especially for the summer).

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure nobody wants to hire somebody with a brand spanking new PhD that's been a dean. Hrm. Damn.

No Autorun for you!

So this is me, beating my poor old mac with a stick. I like macs, I really do. But when they put out their requirements for running software, they should be honest. The old 800Mhz processor might run the software, but it won't DO anything. It sits there, it spins. So although I could try and create an autoran pretty little introduction to my assignments CD, you're not getting that. Because if I have to watch the pretty little spinning disk thing for one more minute I'm going to lose my mind. Also, because autorun.inf files for windows can't be directed to an html file, they have to be directed to an exe, and I'm not writing something in C OR downloading an application to do that for me.

So neener. You get to open the index.html file yourself, which isn't all that pretty. I'm saving the pretty for the course website I'll be building over break.

Somehow this struggle has got me to thinking about how I can talk to my students about "good" writing. We all know it's impossible to define. We all know it might not really exist. But because students will want to know what I think good writing is, I know I have to come up with some course appropriate answer to that. Given that I'm already having them write proposals and design plans for written work, I think I can use those proposals and design plans to get at this idea that "good" writing or communication are those things that adequately convey the point the author wished (if not several others unintended but maybe better) to the given audience. I'm having them define their audience and goal first, so these proposals and design plans work as a sort of starting point on talking about rhetor intent and finished product and how the two relate, but also how sometimes rhetor intent doesn't have anything to do with how we receive something as well (particularly, the creative non fiction unit will allow me to do this, since it's easier to control how a person responds to an essay than to a story, which is ONE of the reasons I want to keep that contrast in my syllabus, and it's also why I think we've been hung up on five paragraph essays for so long: the audience's experience is very controlled, they get what they expect, but that's not how real communication works... even if you want it to... so by mid class that definition of "good" communication should be all nicely complicated, but I'll still have students trying for it with the design plans, and thinking more critically about using a variety of ways of reaching their audience.....

And damn that's a big paragraph.

But I got to thinking about that because of me trying to find a "pretty" way to present my course materials. I can't say why it matters, it's some odd compulsion that I picked up from being a tech comm major. I just don't have time to really show off right now, so you get a very simple html file instead. My intent was to use director to make an autorun.exe file that would play when you put the cd in. That didn't happen. Did this project fail? Well... no. I just had to reconfigure things. As much as that frustrates me, that reconfiguration/revision thing is part of this course too....

*grin*

Ha! Richard Marback posts about something I think about often: http://detroitrhetoric.net/welcomemachine.htm

Huh, too bad I turned it into a "crazy person or blue tooth headset" game.

huh

I have *3* students for next term enrolled. Is that normal? If not, damn do I need to get rid of the scary looking foreign last name.

interesting spam

I've been getting really interesting spam. I know, silly, right? But I can't help but think that some of these lines read like something created from the cut-up method we've studied so much this term (enough that I'll probably be sharing these from time to time, don't mind me):

When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself.

Twenty years ago, the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife instituted an any

If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.

The watch is surrounded by ninety bezel set diamonds that weigh.

What do you think about this sleek and contemporary Zoppini.

Blue topaz is created by irradiating very pale topaz, and. Just about everyone who knows anything about the industry adds his two bits about how dangerous it is and how.

And I mean this with all due respect.

Let's talk necklaces to see which types of necklaces work best. Even in the knocks of life, we can find great gifts. Make sure you understand what is the right time and what is the wrong time!

a believer that he set up a worm composting bin in his garage at home

But Paisleys not your average citizen. bicycle in the back that had been stolen from a residential garage on Municipal .
If it's later in the evening and I'm alone, I'll take a cab before I'll leave my car in a cavernous parking garage.

One of the issues I hit while setting. The concept involves storing next-of-kin contact information in your cell phone under the acronym ICE so that EMT, police and other first reponders can quickly locate the information. said David Gilbert, co-owner of the Old Yellowstone Garage restaurant in .

Winter also accelerates the tendency of plastic to degrade over time.

He fused monoclonal antibody and synthetic peptide technologies and accepted a staff position at Scripps.

The results, no matter the cause, are horrific and devastating. Greasemonkey enables the execution.

In the meantime, they recommend you keep your recreational equipment inside a garage or at an off-site storage facility.

Thankfully for them fashion is no longer out of their reach

The reason is simple; the companies that store the cord blood tout the advantages to saving this once in a lifetime supply of stem cells.

In some cases hair loss is a medical problem but in many it is hard to find the exact cause for it. For some, that fascination with big trucks never wanes, these are the truck drivers of America.

These are now considered to be distant cousins of the everyday wheelchairs.

This is a very common procedure and can yield some very important information for the doctor as to your health and wellbeing. That could be metal pieces, wood chips, plastic shards or anything else that you work with on a regular basis. The DWI laws are changing faster than most people can keep up with them.

This is a process that requires additions of or removal of skin, cartilage, all in order to make the person more stunning in their own eyes.

If you have thought about learning to drive a tractor trailer, you might have questions about where to start and what to look for in a school.

No, buying a vehicle of any sort has become relatively difficult.

AFROMET supporter and British Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt has put down a motion calling on the British Museum to return a number. Maybe you have tried sleeping aids and found that they left you feeling groggy and sluggish the next day. These are used in the computer world and have been taken by storm in the gaming communities.


....
See what I mean? I'm thinking there's got to be a way to construct some kind of writing around these. Heck, I can just see me trying to make an assignment out of this (then again, most of my students probably get porn spam instead of my eloquent spam, oh well). I get a couple paragraphs worth of this a day.

I believe that this spam is trying to get itself past spam blockers by pulling off random words and groups of words from other sites or e-mails, no matter what, I think the weird combinations are kinda fascinating.

random unconnected crap

Doesn't that title make you feel like reading?

I've begun to wonder why people can't seem to discuss teaching methods and philosophies around these parts without fighting or getting upset, or at the very least not being very fruitful. I've heard a bit of this going on, and it's very very foreign to me, having worked two other places where since we had nothing else in common, really, talking about students and teaching was a nice neutral ground where we were, more or less, guaranteed to have a nice conducive discussion. Weird.

Of course, this is probably why Jeff doesn't let us discuss these things very often in class. I thought he was being persnickety, now I'm thinking he was being smart. Hrm.

I have discovered that there is a limit to the number of external drives my computer (mac) will find at boot up. I am amused. Next time I get one of these damn things I should get a bigger hard drive.

My mom's car died last Wednesday night, which is bad because I may need it Thursday (I have to sub and then will get 15 minutes to drive to campus, and it's supposed to be freezing rain/snowing then). Yes, it's warm now.

Now, I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong with it, so I wrote it down and had her take it to the dealer to have the part replaced. Apparently, since it is not setting a code in the computer AND they couldn't get it to "not start" then there's nothing wrong and she's out of $80. She wouldn't let them yell at me. They quiver in their manly boots when they see me coming.

And of course as of yesterday it was once again not starting. Technology had fucked us over, right?

But no no, I *like* computers remember? Even the one in her car that can't bother to record the 10-15 times her car is idling incorrectly and dying.

So I took my video camera, out for the project I'm doing for Jeff's class, and recorded the damn thing "doing its thing" and told her to take it back, camera with tape in hand, tomorrow. They can't possibly claim that nothing is wrong with proof right there.

All hail the glorious cyborg, for she screws with misogynistic mechanics. Whoot.

*pokes at her mac with a stick*

So I've discovered a great big rule: never throw anything away or copy over it if you MIGHT use it for school again.

The summer before I defended my thesis I was in a Vaudeville show. I wanted to tape it, but forgot to buy new mini dv's for that explicit purpose. So I taped over some raw footage that I had used in a project earlier that year (which I am now hacking apart for my "final project" for class) which was fine at the time. Not so cool when I figure out that was the tape that I had all my interviews on.

Yeah, I'm stupid. Don't mind me.

Fortunately I found a really nice cheap tool that FINALLY worked to pull off the video + audio and squish them back together properly from the DVD I have of the first project (it's 30 minutes long). What's bad is that I know there was some original video that would work better than what was left (and I did have about four hours anyway, just not what I wanted) but I guess I have to make do.

But what this leaves me with is pre-edited video, disembodied voices in parts over explanatory video, and a lot of talk about literacy that I flat out don't need for this project.

It also leaves me with a couple audio level drops that I can't fix without doing a lot of extra work (yes, I know about the clip volume adjustment thingy in iMovie, and I've been using it, and I know I could export the clip in question and increase its volume and then re-import it, but when I do that it gets static-y, and I KNOW I could use some expensive software I have to clean the damn audio by hand, but...)

Yeah, but. But if I were one of my students I'd tell them to leave it, that the message of the video isn't lost because of these 2 random audio drops. That they shouldn't spend HOURS cleaning up one section (though they would for a more professional, being paid for project).

I think if the computer were running more smoothly it'd be easy for me to say that I'm definitely going to clean it up. But as it stands I feel like I'm poking it with a stick and rebooting a lot just to get what I've got. Plus I couldn't even get iMovie to load the waveforms for my mp3s to line stuff up as well as I'd like, I don't think I have a chance in hell of getting any of my audio software to run that's more advanced than Audiacity (which I hate, with a bloody passion, but have been using anyway because it doesn't eat up all my processing power).

I dunno, I'm *not* my own student in this case, even though I'm doing my own assignment. Bah, maybe I'll finish some other stuff and see how much time I have left first...

flightless birds and missed kairos

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I went to see Happy Feet yesterday. I've seen the previews, I thought it'd be a cute kids' movie about an outcast who tap dances instead of sings, and I both sing AND tap dance, so how could it miss?

Well, the movie wasn't about that, it was a 2 hour rhetorical strike against the fishing industry, which doesn't count as a "miss" automatically in my book. But it DID miss, no matter what the critics tell you, and I'm pretty sure that if I had taken a kid to this movie that I'd be downright angry at the heavy handed rhetoric being forced onto my kid that I had NO idea about based upon the previews and all the toys.

So first, I'll warn that there are spoilers here. But if you have kids, some of these spoilers might be useful to you--I dunno. But if you wanna be surprised, stop here.

Still with me? Good. So here's where the movie's rhetoric shined, and shined so much I actually thought they were going to pull it off:

1. Near the end of the movie, Mumble uses his dance moves to communicate with man, bring man to his fellow penguins, and get man to help them out. The previews certainly did the same trick to me--the dancing penguins in the previews WORKED to get my ass into the movie theater.

2. Somewhere in the middle Mumble is playing with some new friends and they start an avalanche of sorts. You see this big piece of construction equipment fall off the cliff with them, seemingly randomly. In any order animated film this would be something to laugh at, some random visual element thrown in for laughs. But it wasn't, they used it, and did so well.

3. The movie adequately calls upon both the concept of the "Other" in Mumble and also sets him up to be the one true savior of penguin society--and if they'd left it there, it might have worked. The movie is obviously SET UP to be a myth, with a narrator and all, so using the same sort of character as The Matrix and Star Wars and other similar hero-quest myth stories makes absolute sense.

4. All the people in the movie are REAL people, not computer animated. That's when the movie stops being a myth abruptly, and it works. It's cool.

So what's not to like?

Well, after all that, the movie jumps the shark spectacularly. My ticket was ALMOST worth it just to discover that I could, indeed, call a missed kairotic moment "jumping the shark" and that it may very well be useful to do so to students "Well, your paper jumps the shark here..." because that terminology describes what's wrong with a lot of arguments so much better than other language (you know, once I explain what that means).

I had a lot of hopes halfway through the movie. They were obviously on an ecological bent--save the fish. Hrm okay. I'd recently read an article that says all the fish supplies will be gone by the year 2048 or something like that, so the timing on the article + movie was right.

Mumble ends up in a zoo, and goes kinda crazy and starts seeing things. I've not been a fan of zoos since I was at the Toledo one and this poor high school girl was stuck standing in front of the tiger exhibit, with the skin of their star tiger's HEAD, letting people pet it. Ew. That's cruel and gross, so I don't do zoos very well (though I still wanted the detroit one to stay open last year, go figure, if only to compete against the nasty tiger head down in Toledo).

Uh anyway, I can buy that. But then, it's like the studio execs said "we're running out of time! hurry up and shove it down their throats!" and they started dying on every single last move in the film. It's freaking PAINFUL.

First, a little girl taps on the glass at Mumble, and he remembers how to dance. The very next scene he's back on the ice at home and he's got a radio transmitter BUILT INTO HIS BACK. I mean, ow. It's clear people were excited about him and his dancing, but I figured he was just hallucinating again. You could see everyone in the entire audience (and it was packed with families because we're cheap and do matinees) looking around going "wtf?" to each other.

Because at least the grown ups know that no zoo would let a tap dancing bird into the wild again, even with a transmitter. Duh. And how'd he let them know he wanted to come back? How'd ANY of this happen? If you're going to have REAL humans in a computer animated flick, then they need to act like real humans, or else the fact you used REAL humans is utterly meaningless.

So he's back home, and the humans are coming, and he convinces everybody to dance for them, overthrowing the crazy christian like cult that this group of penguins lives in. And they dance, and it changes the world.

No really. The next few minutes is a series of shots of how people saw the penguins dance and immediately changed the world. There's this super fast animation of them pulling fishing boats away from the penguins' habitat and getting rid of them all, of people stopping eating fish COMPLETELY, and being moved by the dancing penguins. Oh, and the penguins don't become a vacation destination, like they undoubtedly would in real life.

This is all over in a matter of minutes, then we see that the fish are back, Mumble has a kid with his long time girlfriend, and pow, the movie is over.

And people applauded, but kids were looking around going "what the heck?" I was right with them.

The movie jumped it by first of all not spending enough time on the transformation. It was the most heavy handed move I've ever seen in any movie EVER: people did this and all the penguins were happy! YOU HAVE TO DO IT TOO!

Will this work on kids? I dunno. By that point, the movie is so damn slow they were probably bored out of their minds. The first half was fun, the second, more important, half was boring as all hell. So my guess would have to be no.

The sequence is so damn painful that I can't even begin to describe why. It wasn't painful in a "make you uncomfortable" sort of way either, it was just out of step with the rest of the movie. They seemed to be building up to something big and good, and I thought that maybe there would be a true moment of kairos here, but no--it just doesn't work. The penguins are flightless, so's the rhetoric.

But it did get us talking. The boy was talking about how there's just too many people in the world. I was puzzling over why they made that last really shitty rhetorical move. It could have been brilliant.

Except I can't think of a single OTHER thing they could have done. Had the people cut back fishing a little? Had the people start feeding the penguins? Have a fund set up that movie goers could donate to to help the birds? (actually, that last one is a little closer to what they might have done with a scaled back ending.)

You can't talk about overpopulation in this movie, though that might have been done in a different sort of one. You can't tell people that if EVERYONE in the entire world stopped eating fish that then they'd be eating something else, encroaching on some other poor animal's habitat (but that other poor animal isn't a cute and smart little penguin, so clearly that's okay). You can't do that, so at best, this movie might have made people THINK.

And that's what it fails to do, it spoon feeds a solution instead of making people think of a solution (or at least a bigger one, had they not gone for the rock 'em sock 'em ending that they did). Kids might never eat fish again, but they're parents are likely to tell them it's just a movie and to eat the damn fish sticks anyway.

Maybe somebody will be inspired by this movie to become an activist and someday take those fishing companies on. Maybe that was the point. Maybe they just wanted to create that one person that will change the world. But where does that leave the rest of us? If we wanted to help, we were given no way to do so. And even if we do care, that ending was so gosh darned wince inducing that I practically ran from the theater, embarassed that I had EVER wanted to see it.

Because it misses, that much, in those last few minutes. The critics are cheering that a kids movie took on a big issue--great. But if the big issues are taken on and the movie fails at it--what's to crow about?

x-posted over at my other journal.

Palimpsest

So listening to Jenna on Monday talk about palimpsests reminded me of an exhibit I saw this weekend, and reading her blog just now reminded me that duh, I had wanted to post about that.

Anyway, so I was in the middle of reading Haynes and stopped to go out for the afternoon. We decided to go to the Henry Ford Museum because we've got memberships and hadn't seen the new christmas exhibit yet (better yet, the usual upcharge exhibit is free this year--nifty).

It's a display on Tasha Tudor, who was famous for drawing christmas cards and writing children's books about Welsh Corgis. She apparently also was really obsessed with doll houses and dolls and played with them and told stories about them all her life. Yeah, so that last part is a little weird, but... whatever.

Her exhibit included a lot of early versions of cards with the final ones--which was really cool. It was interesting, not unlike the palimpsest that Jenna showed us, to see where changes were made and think of why that may be. Actually, I always find art palimpsests to be fascinating.

Then we walked around to the back wall and there displayed for the world to see was drafts of her writing with mark up included. My first reaction was to turn to the boy and go "Yeah, so if I ever manage to get famous--as unlikely is that is--and somebody hangs up my drafts in a museum after my death with my corrections all over them I will be back from the dead to haunt their ass faster than you can say 'mycoplasm'" which I had completely forgotten was from another reading and WASN'T the same thing as ectoplasm, but he's really deathly afraid of mushrooms so I guess in the end it got the same result.

Of course, I've been reading too much to not have to sit back and consider why that is. Why does the art palimpsest appeal but the written one, not so much? Why do I fear so greatly anybody seeing my early draft stuff?

Well, for one, I think my drafts suck--if they exist anymore at all. Second of all, if anybody dug up what I cared about as a child as museum quality work I'd want their head examined. To be honest, I did a lot of the things as a kid that were in this exhibit--I made tiny newspapers and books complete with tiny writing and illustrations for my My Little Ponies, I wrote elaborate stories based upon the characters that I thought they were (not the ones from the animated series), and so on. My mom proofread those stories for me... and then I'd correct them....

And really, the "palimpsests" that were given to us for this Tasha Tudor exhibit in the writing section really were just that--they were proofread. I don't think it's interesting that somebody at some point forgot to type a word before Microsoft could point that out to us. It would have been interesting to see that she had deleted a rather racially uh... "racy" ... section about "being the Nigerian" at Christmas, or maybe hadn't had it in at first, but nothing about these texts changed except spelling and missed words, so whatever thought process might have been in a more revised palimpsest just wasn't there.

So then, what makes proofread marked up text museum quality work anyway? If we can't learn anything about somebody's thought process that could paint really well but just might have been a little crazy, why hang it up at all? I kept thinking that "Tasha Tudor" must be some kind of author-function that I just hadn't been aware of before. After all, I'd be drooling to see original Shakespeare manuscripts (or even Derrida or Heidegger). So why not Tasha Tudor? Is it just because she isn't that popular or important of an author function for me? Or is it because palimpsests of minor superficial changes aren't really palimpsests at all unless there are major revisions to be seen?

hrm.

I find it interesting that in the writing center notes that I've been putting into the database when a tutor is going to say something negative about a student they nearly always reiterate the student's name. Why is naming the person you're going to say something bad about more important than naming a person you're going to say something good about?
And why tell us twice *or more* that a student is ESL?
Just hrm...

more feminist theory biting me in the butt

Today my boyfriend's mom is having a masectomy. We're pretty sure that once healed she'll be okay, although that will be a long process, so no, that's not what this entry is about.

Instead, I'd like to approach the language surrounding this whole "cancer" thing. Her doctors have gone on and on about how she never had kids, and THAT'S why she has breast cancer now (he's adopted, she's infertile, and so this is definitely not a "fault" issue). Except it really does SEEM to be a fault issue. "Well, if you had just done what you're supposed to do, and had kids the naturnal normal way, then you wouldn't have cancer now" ... or at least, that's how I'm reading a lot of the research.

I've actually seen a lot of news articles recently about how having kids prevents all sorts of cancers, and it's not surprising to see since birth rates are falling.

So it seems to be a "breed or die" message, and I don't particularly like it. In her case, it's utterly ludricrous anyway. Her mom had the same type of cancer, had the same procedure, and lived for years after, AND had four kids. Clearly, breeding was not the answer to cancer prevention here. So what the heck is up with the guilt trip?

Lastly, I will finish up with yet another complaint: on one hand, they're telling us to have sex, have kids, or die. On the other, a vaccine was recently released that would make having sex a lot safer, since we'd be less likely to get HPV and cervical cancer were we to get it. I asked my doctor becuase i've known it's been coming for a long time, not because of the silly commercials. This shot has been around for a long time but was blocked partially by groups that thought it would make women into whores, but uh, that's another post entirely. You want to know how much this thing costs?

Nobody's insurance covers it, it's a series of 3 shots, and it's $170 per shot. The women that could benefit the most from this will probably never be able to afford it. Hell, I'm still debating whether I'm willing to drop the cash or not. I'm not sure what the price is tied to--don't people want this? Don't LOTS of people want this and want their daughters to get it? Or do they just think we'll be whores if we get it? Or do drug companies just know that they can charge whatever they want since this is "teh big bad cancer" ("teh" used intentionally here).

just what sex are student pronouns anyway?

I remember the first time I read an essay that referred to all students as "her," and had two thoughts--one: the writer was female so must just be using her own pronoun, which I've been told you can do; two: what a nice change from the usual he/his or he/she or his/hers because no matter how much Vitannza loves throwing in those "/'s" and no matter how much I did the same thing in my latest Marback essay, replacing a singular personal pronoun with a "/" construction gets old about two pages into an article, let alone 20.

But when I was reading for this week something gave me pause. Cynthia Hayes reminds us that T.R. Johnson talked about students as sado-masochists in "School Sucks" and somewhere very close to the "happily bound and gagged" by writing line refers to students by the feminine...

I have, admittedly, been reading too many feminist bloggers recently. But I really began to wonder where this "student as female" set-up came from. Eveyrwhere else we as a country refer to unspecified people as male and yes, feminists complain about it. But think, just for a moment, all the things we usually say about students. Think of all those commonplaces that we have to think about students:

They can't write. They're bad writers. They can't think. They don't read the way we want them to. The way they respond to our assignments is boring. They don't care. They...

And I think that it's sort of strange that in the ONE field where we constantly make the statement that our object of study--students--are doing poorly but that WE--their opposite--have the magical bullet or pedagogy that somebody could use to turn that around--that we refer to all students as female.

I remember writing up the research study I ran for my thesis and avoiding personal pronouns like the plague. If I used "she" somebody would know what student I was writing about--I had that few female students. If I used "he" I was clearly being a bad feminist. But they were nearly all "he's," and thus I started designating students by letters--by fake names--anything, really, to keep from having to use a bloody pronoun.

I'm relunctant to feminize all students. Females are still considered the weaker sex, and if we're going to take on this pedagogy where student writing and circulation is important, if we're going to value abstract writing and juxtaposition, I don't think that we can ALSO consider students as weaker. That's going to either screw up our values or just prove that our values aren't quite in the right place to begin with.

Because, you know, students ARE weaker--right? Isn't that what some people are going to say? That they DO need to be shown the way and that it is our job--as the teachers, the male in this situation--to do that? And I'm sorry, but I'm not so sure. I've never been sure about that, and that's been the driving force of my pedagogy since day 1. Richard Grusin told us in a meeting on Friday that under the "old" program before this class, some students would graduate with their BA and be in the classroom 2 weeks later--well, that was me. And it changed me. Hearing all the other GTI's ripping apart students and saying they couldn't learn but oh THIS might work really truly hurt me because I had just been one. I'd crossed that invisible line to the other side and the way people treated me changed so drastically that I actually went home and laughed one day. "Oh you're one of us now, no need to be rude or denigrating anymore," yeah well, screw you I thought.

And I set out to teach in some way different, I suppose. I value student ideas and intelligence and I ask them to go above and beyond the projects that would normally be assigned in whatever class, and mostly, they seem to appreciate that. I actually have a few exceptions this term, and have to keep reminding myself that I cannot and should not change what I'm doing because one person or two people in all the hundreds I've taught the same material to is resistant...

Anyway, I'd like to close thinking about this sado-masichism thing. Johnson says we teach our students to value pain in writing, if it isn't painful it isn't good for you. And they learn to like that. All the while, this supposedly "female" student learns to like it. To be honest, that construction gives me the willies (if indeed, we are to write as if all students were female).

The BDSM movement is bigger than ever here in the great old USA, and I've even lost several friends to it. Once somebody is "in" they don't seem to be allowed any out. I knew a few female dommes, but to be honest, most of my female friends were subs. And I had to listen as they told about their chosen dominators asking them over time to do more and more ridiculous things--be held underwater, be held underwater and anally penetrated, as the beatings became more severe, and as they would say that the fellow didn't listen to the safeword anymore--but oh, that was okay, because saying "no" was "vanilla."

Yeah, so I lost a lot of friends that way. No, they didn't die, but they thought I was a prude for not approving, and for not diving right on in.

So yeah, what does that have to do with students? For one, I think that BDSM is bad for a lot of women. Likewise, I think that feminising students--whether consciously or not--is also a potentionally bad thing. Seeing students referred to as sado-masochists and all of us nodding and saying "of course?" Well, clearly things have to change. I'm not going to give you a magic bullet though (partially because I think the blender by the same name sounds an awful lot like a vibrator, which would fit into this conversation oh so nicely, but I'm not quite that depraved just yet). I'm not sure that ANY pedagogy picked up all around by all teachers could save our students from being submissive, I think that, instead, this is at least partially a function of teacher personality and teacher investment in the classroom. Last week at the writing center an adjunct marched a student in (as if she couldnt' do it herself--and it was a girl) and asked us to show this student, in front of him, how to do some things in Word. And when we didn't have time, proceeded to do so himself, very poorly--guy didn't have a clue, AND he was being kinda rude abou it. I finished up with my student and calmly and carefully helped this girl learn how to center text and set up a hanging indent.

I could almost see the invisible leash that fellow had his student on though--and that should make us all feel a little ill.

intellectual property

Not-so-hypothetical situation which is thankfully not my own:

A significant other gives you a computer. You use it, you write on it. You break up.
A year later or so he becomes enraged, lets himself into your parent's home, and takes the computer.
The police tell you that the files aren't yours, and never were.
He, according to them, has all rights to the writing, can post it, publish it, whatever. You don't really care about the computer.

I think this is a huge intellectual property issue. I recognize that when you type or work on school computers or for classes that the school essentially owns your work (especially if you sign a contract saying so, as I've had to repeatedly). I get this distinct idea that the law enforcement officials might be mistaken here, but then again, the significant other very carefully researched the law before he did this as well.

So who owns the writing?

And what does that *say* about electronic writing?

blogging... not driven by response?

I'm really curious why so many compositionists don't seem to think that blogging is being driven by response. It seems like they think that blogging is done for the self, for the heck of it...

And while that may be true, I think that blogging is also at least partially driven for and by comments.

After all, there are people (mainly the young people that are being talked about in these articles) that one day drop their serious discourse and whine "If you don't leave me notes/comments, I'm not going to post anymore" or "If you don't comment on me, I'm going to delete you from my friends list" (that one I see from adults a lot) or "People left me rude comments, I'm leaving the blogosphere!" after which they nearly immediately create a new journal under a different name.

People write to be heard, and I think that THAT is perhaps a connection that can be tapped into in class more than people writing to write. And maybe that point has been made somewhere and I either missed it when my dog pounced me or simply haven't read the article that states that yet, but I think that might be how I explain using blogging in my classroom to my students. It's a way to get heard. And if you've never done it before, then here's a chance in class to try it out and maybe someday you'll use it for something that you really care about.

I'm also inviting my students to post news articles and start discussions (pretty much about anything, but I'm moderating) via our shared class blog for extra credit (I grade on a point system, and this has done well before). I don't add in the extra credit till the end, and if you have late or missing assignments it doesn't count, but that seems to be a good way to get them involved in some sort of community discourse (I've done it with message boards, I'm curious as to how it will work on a blog).

Annnnd the students are whining during their test. So I'll bbl.

grad school vs. capitalism

It was said in class the other day that we have far too many unfunded graduate students (agreed) and that grad school isn't about making money (also true). But I think that's an ideal, and that there are only a few grad students in any given school that meet that ideal. To meet that ideal we'd have no dependents, preferably we'd even still be somebody else's dependent.

I only know my own situation, and I can't speak for anybody else, and I'm not going to try to. The more I've thought it out, I've realized that I'm being sort of Marxian about the whole thing, but it's late and this is a blog, not a seminar paper, so you'll have to forgive me the specifics of what he might have said about it all. (I'm also worried about people thinking I'm trying to garner pity, well.. I'm not. But there's complications here, and I think we all have them, and I think we're also often asked to ignore them or drop out, and to me *neither* is an option.)

In any case, as I've told some people, my dad had a stroke 13 years ago. He can't work. My mom stays home to take care of him. My grandma moved in with us back then, but just two years after she *too* had a stroke and my mom also had to stay home and take care of her. My mom got so used to being home that she's slightly agoraphobic and terrifically depressed from time to time, so despite my grandma passing away she still doesn't work. My parents helped me pay for my undergraduate degree, despite this, right up until the point when I got a real good look at their finances thanks to online banking and told them to bugger off.

Now, several changes in health care over the past two years have done a lot to screw them over. My dad's pension is beyond the poverty line, so there's no goverment assistance available. My mom refuses to get herself mentally checked out enough to go on medical disability, so she's not getting the benefits she could be, and believe me, I've tried. When extra money is needed, because my dad's union decides to stop doing things like providing good cheap health care to their retirees, paying for things around here falls to nobody but me.

Because, of course, there is just me. They helped me save when I was younger, and now I do the same for them. Stocks, various high interest short term savings accounts, really whatever's earning me the best interest, I'm putting that away for them now. Sure, some of you would probably say "Well fuck them, they're your parents and should be taking care of you" yeah well, they did. And I feel like I have two options, put money away for the inevitable NOW, or end up giving them pretty big loans later (and not all that later) that would be more difficult to manage.

At the same time, I'm of course also paying for all my own shit, and saving money. Hence, I work. And go to school. And find ways to make that work.

Now, given this, just why the heck would I come back to school anyway?

Well, I spent a year contracting editing/publishing/writing/computer work before I started adjuncting. It was difficult to put money away for anybody while doing this, because my pay rates changed pretty darn often. It was stressful, and a lot of long term positions were being sold to Kelly services and Manpower, and though I checked those out, I was making more on my own on average than doing the same work for just a little over minimum wage, despite that little over minimum wage being steady.

Thus, I found adjuncting. I love teaching, so I quickly started picking up more and more courses. But teaching, and being a faculty member at a private school that encouraged us to go to conferences and publish, just served to remind me of what I was missing. I wanted to go further in school, and I always knew that, but I knew that I wasn't alone in this. I'm in a steady relationship, I have other people that depend on me for some money and emotional junk, and ultimately I had to make the best decision for everybody--not just me.

And that is the decision I think everybody that goes back to school HAS to make unless they're completely alone, unless they're also comfortable being completely selfish. I'm funded right now for a variety of reasons:

1. It's more money for fewer hours per week than adjuncting
2. free tuition
3. I'm getting experience working in a writing center, which I haven't had before

Now, that situation might shift. We *could* be asked to work a lot more hours in the writing center for our money. At which point...

1. I'd be making a lot LESS money for my time than I could teaching
2. If I could spend those hours teaching I could make up for the free tuition
3. After this year, I've got the writing center experience line on my CV

So what, if anything, does that mean?
If it was just me, the first situation is always best. But even if I were being somewhat selfish, that second situation could still invariably blow up in my face at any time. If my parents went bankrupt, or one of them got sick and their insurance refused to cover anything (and I'm working on figuring out a way to get them on mine, though they aren't very happy about it), then wihtout considering funding vs. overall income level I too could end up broke. Or in debt. And I can't exactly afford to be in debt *and* be supporting some savings for older people *and* be considering starting my own family later.

So why be in school at all? It's funny, but I love doing this, and it's where I want to be. And I can make it work, so it's where I am. But I'm not a "responsibilities be damned" kind of girl, and I'm never going to be.

pedagogically speaking...

My second term as a graduate student I was enrolled in a course taught by Dennis Lynch about rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy. Pretty much everything back then came back to "well, what does this mean about teaching?" which I guess is what happens when you are a grad student at a teaching school. In fact, we were pretty practical about making the move from theory to practice, transforming the theory language along the way. One of the conversations came down to a response we'd written on personal pedagogy.

I knew at the time that most of my success at teaching came from two places: I was nearly the same age as my students and had a very good sense of what they wanted and needed from the course, and could blend that expertly with what I thought was important as well, and I'd been a karate teacher not all that long before so I could scare the bejezus out of people into complying if need be. Apparently I can look scary. I think I've lost some of that second part over time.

But despite this, I realized I was relying upon youth and ethos alone, and let's face it--those things aren't going to last. Just a year or two in either direction and suddenly the 80s commercials that I was using to show students how rhetoric worked on them as kids wasn't going to be so strong anymore, and it wasn't like I had a whole collections of 90s VHS's of whatever younger kids watched then to fall back on because I had moved beyond wanting to see everything 60 times by that point.

And so I said that I knew I needed to continue developing or I was going to get stuck, but that I wasn't sure where to go from here.

I can't say that's changed much, except the incentive to "do this now" is stronger than ever. I've been able to put it off since so many of my students are older than me at Baker, and because I can rely on my knowledge of the software I'm teaching to muddle through the bad points. But to teach comp and to work at a higher level than teaching a test these people are going to have to take, well, I know I have to do more.

So what is that exactly? This term I'm thinking about some sort of "Designing Language/Composition" approach. I'm wary of "Designing Language" because it sounds like linguistics and linguistics gives me hives, but "Designing Composition" sounds a lot like page layout, and that's not it either by a long shot.

What I do know is that I want a series of assignments that shows the power of words, the power of juxtaposing words, the power of personal experience with language, and how different kinds of writing are related and are accessible through one another. (How personal narratives are tied to short stories are tied to dialogues are tied to essays, for example.) This, in turn, will allow me to lead back eventually into some of my own research and connect back up to it in new ways (though not this term) in that I researched how you can access writing through online instant messaging when students think it's speech, so yeah, this all lines up pretty gosh darned well.

I'd like to do some stuff with mystory, but I'm going to have to spend some time reading first. My earlier pedagogy clings to me like a static-ed sock--it's stuck to my ass until I peel it off. I don't think it's fair to ask students to do something I haven't worked through extensively and well, I'm just starting there. But I can see where this will eventually fit in with what I just mentioned above, and that's pretty cool. I definitely plan on teaching the research process available in via mystory though, so I'll be able to get some of the benefits immediately.

I know I know, I'm running scared right? But I dunno, right now this feels right. This gives me a place to talk about audience and rhetoric and composition and really nifty things you can do with language all at once. This gives me a place to start playing an argumentation boardgame instead of showing old commercials. This gives me a place to think about teaching to multi generational students instead of what I had at MTU--mainly younger ones. And it gives me enough open framework to start blending in theory seamlessly too.

In other words, I feel good till tomorrow when we go to class and I feel dumb again. But hey, that's grad school right?

national novel writing month and other crap

I'm beginning to think that a potentional damn good use of National Novel Writing Month (November) might be dissertation writing. I mean, why not? Sure it's supposed to be used for fiction...

Yeah, pity my committee. But having a built in non school support group to do lots of writing? That has potential right there.

Uh anyway, I was too busy reading Vico to start on next week's reading yet (That's tomorrow), despite that I've been thinking a lot about strange pedogogies I could invariably form up around stuff I "know." What would writing look like in a pedagogy informed by Soo bahk do? Ballet? The muppets? And I'm actually coming up with answers....albeit they're probably bad.

I think it's officially that time of the semester when I need to start sleeping more just to stay sane.

On Writing New Media ...

I actually read this book last spring, and decided I should probably reread it or else Jeff would probably call on me to recall something that I didn't/couldn't ;). It's a little eerie, to be honest, since I've done a lot of these assignments before, but I'm going to try and mostly not respond from that place and talk about something else instead.

I remember reading a review somewhere that claims that Anne's opening chapter is weak, and that she seems to be writing from somewhere else than the rest of the book. I think I felt that when I read it through the first time--the assignments are good, her second chapter is rooted in an example, etc. But after doing all the reading we've done this term, and having also read the Castells, the Feenberg, the Haraway that she cites, I can't really agree with that pronouncement. It fits in perfectly with all the theory we've been reading and situates the book well. I don't want to say the reviewer was wrong, per se, but is it really fair to review something without also having a good knowledge of just where the book is coming from to begin with? Without having done the background reading so that this "fits?" Hrm... I dunno, but it gives me something to think about if I ever do get around to writing a review....

That said, I'm going to agree with Mike that I like A. Wysocki's idea of new media better than C. Selfe's. I can say that from a couple different angles. I first like that Anne moves away from an interactivity model of new media and pushes this idea that new media is all about material texts. Sweet--we've actually studied that elsewhere this term. Selfe's defintion seems more ordinary, more Computers and Composition and less "New Media" and composition (and given that she edits Computers and Composition it's not really fair to fault her there.)

However, at some point in her chapters she mentions it being "okay" to let a student teach the class how to use a web editor, and that's one point I really disagree with her on and always have. I was that student in more than one class (not hers, but people she taught...) and it annoyed me to no end. As a graduate student, I'm a person always really willing to help anybody who asks. I'd be happy to run somebody through using Dreamweaver, or point them to good resources to learn. But if an instructor says something to the effect of "Well I don't really know how to do this and don't know how to support it but I'm going to let you support each other" I just get angry. It's a left over from my days as an undergrad that I can't shake. In my classroom I teach what I can support (which is actually a generous amount of stuff) because I think it's *my* job to answer student questions. I don't ever suggest that one or two students help all the other ones and then also have to do the project too--that isn't fair to them or to their in class work time. As grad students, we were also sometimes expected to learn lots of new software fast, and although I don't regret that at all (I teach some of that software now, and I also contract whenever I can so it's definitely come in handy) I still really wanted a go to person for support. Her model WORKS, don't get me wrong, those students do what they have to and like me, they probably sort of enjoy it. But sometimes I think it's a mistake to put that kind of pressure on people that are paying YOU to teach THEM.

Anyway, lastly I'd like to respond to Sirc's "Box Logic." I like this idea of collecting things and interrelating them, writing about them, making sense out of them. On the simplest level, I think I'd like to eventually write an assignment (maybe not this term, but definitely by next fall) that asks students to collect things. For now maybe there's something else I can draw upon.

Several times in the piece he mentions "Found Objects" which happens to also be the name of a community I read (but don't participate in) on Livejournal (http://community.livejournal.com/found_objects/). Now, I think it was Ellen who suggested that participating in such things (Myspace, livejournal, facebook) whatever is kinda creepy when you're an adult, and to one extent or another I'd agree, but I've found some really sort of neat communities on Livejournal. Despite the fact I don't have an account, I've got these "Collection" communities bookmarked and like to look at them.

In the case of Found_objects, people post pictures of strange things they've found outside on the street. Some of the objects are a lot "better" than others, but I think I might be able to direct students to look at these objects and think about how they make the normal strange, as Sirc implies we should be doing. Eventually I'd like to write an assignment that asks students to do the same--look for the strange and take pictures of it--but I'll see how writing up an assignment using the community works first. "Find a favorite example and discuss it in a blog entry" maybe. Something like that. I've been flirting with the idea of *some* mandatory blog prompts, this could be one of them.

In any case, Writing New Media feels like it's in familiar territory for me. I should get going and finish reading that last chapter about databases. *waves*

confession time

I've a confession to make...
I rather enjoy giving tests sometimes, in classes that warrant them (computer courses that are meant to be preparation for certification exams are a pretty good example, I think). Writing multiple choice tests, or just rearranging the answers to pre-written ones, is just something I take great joy in.

Why?

Because you can make them spell things. Like the last four answers on the test spell "DEAD." I'm endlessly amused and can memorize the answer key easily. The students never seem to notice because the questions aren't *right* next to each other.

But still....

histories....

One thing I have inadvertantly learned this term is that history, and one's position in it, is really bloody important. During my MS, I learned that I had to "define terms," and that I couldn't just toss out *easy* words like rhetoric without explaining exactly what I meant. These days I define everything that I personally feel I need to, and that not only adds to page length and makes those 10-20 page papers seem a lot less daunting, but it also gives any argument I make a stronger theoretical background because, of course, I have to usually call upon other people to define any term I choose.

I was reading Berlin, and reading yet another version of composition history, and realized that nearly every text I've read gives, at some point, a historical standpoint on its topic. On one hand, this was an "oh shit" moment, as I also realized that this was something I was going to have to do relatively soon and I don't feel particularly prepared. But I also began to realize that that stating what is really important to you from a field's history, or what arguments you think are still valid, or arguing about what has shaped a field or position is just as important as going ahead and stating why you think those things should change. History is necessary, and even when I'm beginning to wonder exactly how many more histories of composition and rhetoric there could possibly be, I'm beginning to think that the answer is infinite.

So yeah, historically grounding my approach to my dissertation is something that I will potentionally have to do. Nifty. I couldn't do that now, so that could give me a place to go to when I need to start thinking qualifying exams--niftier. Having any sort of direction is a down home martha stewart style good thing.

Lots of random stuff

Yesterday was potentionally my weirdest day teaching ever. I first had a girl into the writing center whose teacher was clearly marking her down because she isn't a native speaker of english. I put a note in her file that proofreading her is okay--most of her ideas are well developed as it is, but she's naturally very frustrated. I, too, was frustrated because her teacher is suggesting that she "listen to real Americans speak more" and to "memorize grammar rules" rather than have somebody proofread her damn papers (and those are highly edited comments, the real ones were quite a bit worse). He wants her to be able to write perfect the first time, and I don't think that's going to happen even in a native speaker. *sigh*

Anyway, then I go to work, where one of my students gives her paper on Gonorrhea, because she's a nurse and she's surprised at how many people come in with it. Fine. Then one of my over achievers all but admits that she has it by asking extensive questions about symptoms and testing, and wouldn't let me cut her off. Just EW. There's some things I don't need to know people!

And then another student failed to turn in a paper or a presentation, just outright refused to do it. Okay, fine. I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. This is a potentionally pre-comp class though, and I grade as such. This is EASY POINTS. So why not do it, even if it's crap, to earn at least some of those easy points?

Lastly, I've finally perhaps decided what I want to do with blogging/wikis/so on next term. I'm thinking of having a class blog with all students as potential posters. It'll be half blog/half discussion board, and I suspect if all the info is in one place they might be more likely to read each other, leave comments, and try to write something somewhat unique. At least, that's the idea.

I'm still sorely tempted to try to use the message board and picture system in Facebook in order to discuss things with my class. However, I used a "question" community of college students on Livejournal to trial run that idea, and most of them were against it because they want their public profiles to remain private, away from their teachers. I've had an account on there since the month the site opened, and so have other youngish instructors I know, so privacy? Good luck with that. I understand their position though.

I think that there is a great deal of technology out there that students are already using that COULD be used in the classroom, potentionally very well. But if students are dead set against it being used that way, and I only want to do it to get that publication credit, then I know I really shouldn't. I've known far too many graduate students and faculty that use technology in the classroom as an easy way to get published, and I don't really want to be one of them (mostly because I thought they were batshit crazy when *I* was an undergrad). Still, I think that social networking systems might be the wikis and blogs of tomorrow, it just isn't something that I can do right now.

on doing reading for other courses at the very last minute...

I just started reading Agrippa for my history of rhetoric class...

and was nearly immediately reading a passage about magical necklaces and such that perform various things like making people well...

One of them involves hanging the finger of an aborted (miscarried, assumbably) child from one's neck in order to prevent conception as long as it's there.

I can't help but imagine how THAT would work:

Man from that time period: Hey baby, wanna go back to my place and make sweet sweet love?
Woman from that time period: Sure! Let me just get my cloak...
Man from that time period (leaning in for the kiss): You're such a insatiable little...
*and then he notices the finger*
Man from that time period: What the fuck? Is that a finger?
Woman from that time period: Yes, it's so you can't get me with child. *She tries to stroke his cheek with it and it leaves a little smear of rot*
Man from that time period: Gah! You crazy bitch! (runs away, sex does not happen, charm works! Write that one down...)

hybrids

Next semester I'm teaching a new kind of course, and I'm excited about it for all sorts of reasons (this would be my one "outside Wayne" course, not that I'm not excited about Comp... but this is special). Anyway, it's what's called a "hybrid" class which is really good for me for a few reasons.

Hybrid courses meet half time in person and half time online (sometimes they are called blended courses). That means that they meet half as often, and even though I'll be at that school every week anyway for meetings and sometimes even up in Flint for curriculum junk, I won't be actively lecturing every week which is good.

But what I think is really cool about this particular class is that it is about Grammar--the style guide appropriate to the office, in this case--and that usually it's just a memorization class. Students memorize a bunch of off the wall homonyms and learn comma rules and abbreviation rules for the office. That's it. Memorization. Most boring lectures EVER.

But for the hybrid I'm required to give them lots of extra reading and work for the days we don't meet, and they are required to participate in discussion online or they fail. To me this means that I can bring in lots of issues and have them talk about things like Standard English and why we learn grammar and other such things which I could TRY to do in the classroom, and HAVE tried to do in the classroom, but without mandatory participation most people just don't try. I see the hybrid as being a way of getting at that information and including a lot of things in the course that wouldn't ever come up in the classroom and that's really cool.

And well, maybe there's a paper in there somewhere...

other people's kids.....I'll tell you...

student: I'm missing assignments.
me: yep. *grades other people's stuff*
student: Why?
me: 'Cause you didn't turn them in, or if you did, your name wasn't on them.
student: I had to turn those in?
me: *stops grading other people's stuff, gives him a look... very very slowly...* Yes, you have to turn the homework in.
student: Oh, I didn't know that.
me: *thinks, "how the heck would I give you points for it otherwise?"* Yeah, you have to turn it in.
student: But I did it.
me: So bring it in next time.
student: Oh, you can't tell I did it?
me: *the homework is printed out and then filled out by hand, so uh... no* No, you need to turn it in for credit.
student: Oh, okay.

*head desk*

underlife indeed

Clearly I'm a horrible person for finding out that a new tool has been installed on a lot of instructor computers that allows you to project from them more easily. Since some projectors are installed upside down/sideways, this tool allows you to turn the image on the monitor 90, 180, or 270 degrees.

However, I'm greatly amused that this ALSO means that I can walk up to any instuctor computer and press cntrl+alt+up and it flips the screen 180 and the mouse works opposite too. What a wonderful prank that could be. :)

Of course, I have to be all responsible and not tell the students... bah.

stripper papers and other stories

One of my old students e-mailed me recently about something er other, doesn't really matter what, the conversation eventually ground down to "I can't believe you let me write a paper about strippers."

Hrm, what to say? He wrote one of the best essays in the course which managed to circumvent most of the problems such a paper could have. He interviewed people, he didn't write in a boring format, and his presentation was entertaining. He wasn't even demeaning to women, and approached the whole "this is our power over men girlfriend!" thing with a sort of skepticle aplomb.

So, given that he was able to engage with the subject and write a non traditional really GOOD essay for a course, why should he still be surprised that I said okay?

Yeah, it was a risk. But I'm not particularly afraid to take risks. I thought his paper was far less a risk than "I hate this fucking class" girl of a term earlier who insisted writing about how much she hated affirmative action because it *sniff* kept her out of U of M, which quoted racist sites (and she wouldn't take no for an answer on that either). Honestly, writing about a profession that we either joke about or look down on or are suspicious of--yeah it could have gone badly, but things have gone worse.

And so my response fell into the lines of "you wrote a good paper." Would it have been a mistake if he hadn't? I dunno. It's too difficult to tell ahead of time sometimes what will be "good" or not.

book reviews

Faigley, Lester, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe. Picturing Texts. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. 640 pp. $47.00

Wysocki, Anne Frances, and Dennis Lynch. Compose Design Advocate. New York: Longman Publishing Group, 2005. 456 pp. $56.00.

Position of Both Texts:
Both Picturing Texts and Compose Design Advocate were written partly in response to a perceived institutional and cultural need. Specifically, a new course designed at Michigan Technological University in 2000 had turned three composition courses into one communication and rhetoric course (the University switched from quarters to semesters in that year). This course took composition and combined it with other information like technical writing, graphic design, and rhetoric, and was part of a new University Wide courses program. At about the same time, the New London Group had published their text Multiliteracies, which encouraged instructors to approach teaching composition as an amalgamation of “literacies” that students already have use of in their daily lives—more about this later. Other American Universities were also resituating their courses in this way—creating new courses that help students communicate in more ways than simply writing, as well as learn about their world, discover advocacy, and so on. It was clear to many instructors that this sort of course could use a new kind of textbook, and not the reader that was thrown together for the first few years of the course.

This particular course covered written, oral, and visual rhetoric. Teachers were strongly encouraged to use “advocacy” as a way of getting at rhetoric of all forms, though it was not required. Many decided to use technology and new media instead—since some sections of the course could be taught “computer intensive” and have access to a department ran computer lab. Every teacher had to give a research paper assignment and one oral presentation—otherwise the course varied a great deal from one teacher to the next.

The existing text for the book was a reader without exposition which students were extremely prejudiced against. The reader was expensive, printed in black and white, and poorly constructed which meant that students could rarely resell it. This was extremely unfair to the text, which offered a decent selection of readings, but students’ preconceptions of the text made it difficult to use in the classroom. Because the class would have a graphic design component, the fact that this text was thrown together essentially as a course pack—no formatting changes made to articles contained within—teachers knew that they needed something new, something colorful, and something that would give them examples of good design, photography, and a variety of “texts” (and not just writing) to rhetorically analyze in class.

Out of this need, at least three textbooks have been published. Of course, these books are useful outside of their immediate discourse community, and outside of the University they were published in. They are all colorful, well designed, and contain information about rhetoric, advocacy, and image. However, the two texts I review here take a very different approach to confronting the issues of multiliteracy, advocacy, visual design, and composition, which makes them useful in different sorts of classrooms even though they were essentially designed for the same course.

Picturing Texts, Specifically:
According to its authors, Picturing Texts is a book written for students that are growing up, communicating, and living in an information saturated society, which teaches composition and rhetoric via rich visuals (3). These authors seem to believe strongly in multiliteracies: literacy has changed, people are learning and communicating in new ways, and even composition texts can be highly visual in nature. Because texts that students will encounter in their daily lives will likely be visual, the aim of this book is to expand a composition course to encompass visual and written texts—to “picture” texts, if you will.

The chapters of this text follow an understandable sequence: introducing visual and verbal composition, analyzing visual and written arguments, three chapters about social and cultural representation (again, written and visually), and lastly some instruction on creating visual texts. All information about visual design is contextualized with composition, although this is not a text for anyone looking for explicit instruction in grammar or composition forms, or a text for anyone looking for explicit graphic design instruction. The only information about graphic design (contrast, repetition, etc.) seems to be taken from Robin William’s text, The Non-Designers’ Design Book, but is greatly abbreviated.

Each chapter, no matter its intention, contains about four to six readings that are framed by exposition. This exposition tends to introduce very basic information: “In both writing and design, we regularly use comparison to explain or demonstrate an idea” (30). However, the accompanying visuals (two signs that use toilets with the seat up or down to signify men’s or women’s bathrooms) are clever and make a better argument in many cases than the text does. This really isn’t out of place in a text about the power of visual argument, but the framing might be written on too basic a level to engage all students.

Fortunately, the readings themselves are well chosen and can lead to discussions in class about nearly anything—social justice, cultural anthropology, visual composition, race, class, and so on. The “Focus” and “Respond” questions available in the text after each reading may sometimes seem to be easy for a college level text, however, the Instructor’s Guide, written by Cheryl Ball, provides more assignments and exercises that can be directly applied to engage students more fully. Each chapter also calls for students to write about pieces—whether visual or written—and in some cases, to create visuals of their own. These projects could easily be incorporated into a course that has students journal or blog—many of these writings could be interesting if shared. The book’s website, www.picturingtexts.com, also has additional assignments, readings, and writing that ask students to do things like analyze websites, use of visuals online, and even use of text online. This fills a gap in the text, since the text itself does not deal with visual rhetoric online itself (which makes sense in a way, since reproducing a webpage on one or more physical pages would change the experience of looking at the page entirely, links create a sort of rhetoric on their own that is not reproducible in a text. However, it is a shame that students or classrooms without internet connections will be missing the richness of the online materials.) Other supporting materials—a brief glossary, an easy to use index, and a well situated preface, complete the text and offer support to students who are wondering why this isn’t “just another composition book.”

Diana George previously published a textbook with John Trimbur called Reading Culture. Trimbur writes briefly about that textbook in his article “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” published in CCC in 2000. He states in that article that one of the concerns of Reading Culture was keeping students from experiencing semiosis—accepting mass culture, simply being readers and consumers of it, without being critical of it (12). For this reason, Reading Culture is primarily a text about looking at cultural artifacts and analyzing them critically, as well as learning to be immune to their rhetoric. Trimbur suggests in this article a break from that idea, that “texts” don’t need to be read as such, and that students aren’t as susceptible to the mass media as we might assume. However, Picturing Texts, ironically enough, seems to be exactly the sort of text that could be used in this manner—to produce students aware of the rhetoric around them and to make them somewhat immune to the pressures of a mass media society. It would be interesting to find out what Trimbur might have to say about this newest text of his old partner—would he be as critical of it as he is of his own stance from six years ago?

This textbook fills a gap in undergraduate textbooks created by composition and rhetoric’s focus on multiliteracies and visual rhetoric. Any number of articles have pointed out that instructors must expand their focus of composition courses, and some books have been written to fill in a theory gap (see Wysocki and Selfe’s Writing New Media, Kress’s Literacy in the New Media Age), but very few textbooks have been created that begin to address how exactly visual and new media rhetoric can actually be included in a undergraduate textbook. This text is even further set apart from other texts being published about visual rhetoric because visuals are presented as texts themselves that can be read and analyzed separately from text. This is exactly the sort of reading that visuals often receive in the “real world” and are invaluable skills for students to have.

However, despite the fact that the text is attempting to fill a gap, it does not do much to actually give students any instruction in how to produce visual texts. What software can be used? What materials are necessary to do so by hand? Some students, if simply asked by their instructors to “create,” may feel lost without some basic instruction in these areas.

The visual design of this book is highly professional, and each page will help students learn new things about layout and visual argument. This is not surprising considering that Diana George, one of the authors, has published repeatedly about visual argument and using it in the classroom. The layout is inviting, and pages that are black and white often are given a color background instead to remain visually interesting. There is not a single page in the book that does not have a visual element to it, here, form meets content and creates a strong visual whole.

There are many different ways of using this text, and it could be used in a number of different classrooms. For this reason, it is probably best for an instructor interested in it to read the entire text and decide which pieces would be most useful for the classroom in question. For example, the expository information that bookends each chapter might be left out to deal with the readings as cultural artifacts.

Students that are interested in design or even just the internet, movies, or magazines are going to find this text more engaging than one that is “simply” about the composing process on its own. The idea that writing and visual composition might have a lot in common, and that students could probably learn to combine their composing process of one with the other, is relatively unique in an undergraduate text. This beautifully designed textbook will probably reach any number of students that believe they are enrolled in yet another boring composition course and help them to engage with classroom material.


Compose Design Advocate: A rhetoric for integrating written, visual, and oral communication:
According to the back cover of Compose Design Advocate, the text’s goal is to make students “fluent in multiple modes of communication: written, visual, and oral.” In addition to helping students to read these sort of texts, the book also provides instruction in creating them—and not just standard five paragraph essays either. Compose Design Advocate (hereafter CDA) treats these as separate entities only passingly—there is a clear connection between the rhetoric used in designing each type of communication. The text also makes it clear that students can and should be creating texts in all of these modes, and should also be thinking about choosing the best mode for any given communication. This purpose—empowering students to write more than the standard essay, and to start composing in more than just written form—could be achieved through the text alone, though how much this happens in each classroom will probably depend on the instructor’s focus.

This book is both one that could be used easily in a traditional composition classroom and also classrooms of many different types (graphic design, creative writing, etc), and due to its aims we are lead to thinking that this is not a bad thing—if we don’t already. CDA is divided into three sections: designing compositions rhetorically, producing compositions, and analyzing the arguments of others—an emphasis on production makes this book potentially stand out as a composition text and a reader. Instead of focusing on traditional academic writing for undergrads (5 paragraph essays and their ilk), Wysocki and Lynch (referred to in text as Anne and Dennis, which gives the text a familiar feel) start with giving students tools that can be used for any composition project. Students are lead to create a “design plan” that can be used for posters, academic essays, speeches, or even books—any time communication is necessary. Two design plans are created (one simple, the other more complex) as examples, and the final communication is also included. This approach gives students tools that might be useful after they escape the institution, instead of just giving them tools that will be useful in future courses but potentially fail them in the workplace.

The majority of the text is exposition about various forms of communication, rhetoric, and designing all of the aforementioned. Each form of communication (oral, written, visual) is discussed in rhetorical terms. In the last section of the text, students are also given tools and language that can be used to analyze photographs, posters, instruction sets, and even comics. Many different assignments could be written out of these sections—a teacher could use the instruction set section to run a technical communication unit, or use the comics section to introduce students to combining written/visual communication in new ways in other projects.

One of the strongest elements in CDA is that it gives students real language to discuss difficult subjects. For example, in a section about making an argument the text uses syllogism (and gives a definition) rather than avoiding the term as many other “basic” texts might do. Real rhetorical, photography, and communication language is contained here—the book assumes that students have a basic level of understanding and intelligence which students in turn can work up to. Unlike a lot of other texts, this one doesn’t speak down to them at all and leaves a place for the instructor to define any terms that they are having problems with. Armed with language, students can start developing discourse of their own.

Each section of the text not only discusses existing work, but also suggests that students can create any of the documents included. Student examples are also used to give students in doubt more confidence. The tone of the book is calming (mirroring its writers) which could go a long way toward giving students the confidence they need to begin writing. Additionally, the essays included exemplify what the authors want students to begin creating—documents that develop from narrative form, that use sources as more than guiding points for body paragraphs, and that are planned and developed well. The text itself is well written and well designed and stands as a good example of the sort of rhetorical design Lynch and Wysocki are proposing.

The weaknesses of CDA will vary amongst student bodies. Most of the readings chosen have something to do with civic advocacy, which might work well for some students but might make other students less likely to pay attention to any point the book is making. Although the given definition of advocacy is low level and unfrightening (they’re not suggesting students go out and protest anything) the very word advocacy could make some students likely to think that anyway. Instructors might also feel threatened by the word if they aren’t very politically active, so although the writers suggest that argument and advocacy are everywhere—present whenever you discuss something you are passionate about—the chosen readings and title of the text might prove difficult to overcome in some student bodies.

This text is beautifully designed. Every page is full color and should help to engage students in the material thereon. The chosen readings (although there are very few of them) support the exposition wonderfully. However, at $56 new (amazon.com) this text will probably be the only one used in any given composition classroom, and it almost seems like it would work better in support of a reader, or maybe with more readings. There are additional new media, videos, and images available on the website—and the book suggests using the web as an additional resource—but if these materials are not available in a classroom the instructor will be left on his or her own to locate additional readings.

Overall, CDA performs well and can be used in a number of different ways. It is malleable enough to be useful in many contexts, and allows for instructors to run a variety of different units throughout the term. Since examples of posters, comics, websites, essays, and so on are included, it also includes information on students creating these materials. It does this in a very professional way, and gives students some language in each section to talk about communication academically. Where other texts might fail at giving students only the technical tools to create images and writing, this one succeeds in giving them rhetorical and design processes that they can use into the future.



Other Sources:
George, Diana, and John Trimbur. Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. New York: Longman, 1999.

Rogers, Paul Michael. “Teaching Literacy in a Rhetorical Age: A Review of Picturing Texts.” Kairos. 9.1. Fall 2004.

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” CCC. 52:2. (Dec 2000). Pp. 188-219.

The Internet is for Porn

Driving here today a song from Avenue Q, a musical and Tony winner, came on. It's called the "Internet is for Porn" and hearing it took me right back to the last summer I spent teaching at Tech.

I call myself a technology studies/computers and writing/whatever scholar, but in reality, every time I hearing somebody pontificating about how great the internet could make classrooms I hear this song in my head. I can't help it. An adult teacher approaching the internet for the first time is going to do so differently than a student. Students who have "grown up" with internet access see the internet as a place for fun--chatting, watching videos, downloading music, and yes, porn--not as a place for higher learning. And so the computers and writing teacher's first job should be to recognize that theory is just that--theory--and that the reality is murkier and has pert nipples.

It's hard for that sort of opinion to come across right in class--I think--because I basically support using various forms of technology to get students engaged and interested. Students that see computers and the internet as fun are probably going to enjoy a class more that employs them WELL more than one that doesn't use them at all--or at least, that's the idea. What does using them well mean though?

Well, I can't really answer that question--but neither can anybody else. It's a little like trying to define what good writing is, you have an idea of what it feels like (or makes you feel like) but describing it in succinct terms is harder. So, the following list isn't realy conclusive or new or anything, but it is a list of concrete things I can hold onto and describe instead of vague feelings.

So, using technology well means:

1. Using technology you KNOW and are comfortable with. No matter what you've been told, students don't appreciate having to teach their teacher technology. It is not okay to walk into a class and say "We're going to learn how to create webpages together!' because even though it seems like it works, and students are engaged, they'd be just as engaged if you knew what the heck you were doing.

2. You shouldn't just use technology to be doing it. I teach in a computer lab a lot, because my "other job" is teaching technology courses ABOUT the technology, and there isn't a better way to demonstrate and teach it--I know, I've tried. But that might not be the best way to teach composition, or for any given teacher to teach any given course, so I feel like there needs to be some good rhetorical reason to CHOOSE technology instead of whatever else is available.

3. Lastly, and this ties into this week's readings of renegades and underlife, when students use technologies in ways that you didn't intend--you just sort of have to deal with it, let it go, and figure out ways to either incorporate their uses or circumvent them for next time. I'm one of those people that will do everything with the technology except what I'm supposed to be (or well, sometimes in addition to what I'm supposed to be). I'm the person in the MOO making new rooms and using them to hold sub conversations. I'm the person designing a bat to fly around and poo. I'm the person figuring out how to embed movies in my discussion board questions--and these things, and others like them, drive some instructors crazy. If you are one of those instructors--what're you going to do about it? And, if you're the kinda person this stuff makes want to shoot flames out of your eyes and watch 'em dance--how are you going to approach technology so that it doesn't end with you angry?

And finally, students think the internet is for porn. Standing up in front of a class proclaiming that the internet is "really really great" most likely will make them think the teacher is "really really crazy." Heck, some of them might even fill in the "for porn" at the end of that sentence for you....

planning a presentation

So I'm not asking people to tell me what to do, but I am asking what would be most helpful as a class (and to Jeff, in that "I wanna see what this girl is actually understanding" sort of way).

I'm presenting Monday and I'm curious as to what people want/need out of these. I plan on summarizing and identifying some key words from these articles, but after that I could:

a. provide other resources that go along with these readings
b. introduce new concepts mentioned in the readings that would help tie them together for anybody not familiar (we've read some stuff in 7080 that directly ties to these which was tremendously helpful)
c. provide stories, experiences, etc. that relate directly from the readings to "real world" stuff
d. lead direction away from the articles into "and this has to do with teaching composition because" territory

Or you know, some combination thereof. If I were teaching this stuff that's what I'd be doing, of course, I'm used to teaching on an undergraduate level too (bugger). I guess I just don't feel adequate at standing up and saying "this is what these articles were about" and having that lead into some discussion because any time I've ever done that it just flat out doesn't work.

Whatcha all think?

alright...

I've promised another grammar entry, and you'll get one, but the article I want to write in is in my desk so I think you'll be getting that Thursday.

Anyway.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about how graphic design affects the way a person views a document. I know that it does, and I know that it does in really bizarre ways. When we were discussing texts briefly on the listserv, I was reminded that I chose my text for the other comp 1 course I taught partially because it had a lot of color pictures and yet was still cheap--and students really liked it for that and engaged with the material better than some of the SAME articles presented in a text in black and white that was significantly more expensive. I'd say what was up with that, except these same students reported the color text being easier to read, more fun, and they didn't feel like they were reading a textbook--more like a magazine or a website.

Both the books I'm reviewing seem to be written with this audience in mind--they're colorful and bright, well laid out, and I don't suspect that I'd have that old problem (dully designed book, still expensive) any time here, which is sort of nice. But it's a little disheartening to think that whatever text I pick isn't likely to be judged by undergrads in the same ways I'm thinking about it to review or pick one. Hrm...

On a different but related note, do you think that how we watch a tv show or our experience of TV can be directly changed by the commercials shown?

I'm a fan of Veronica Mars and tonight was the season premiere. Quite honestly I think the show is becomming weak. Sure, the characters were in high school before, but they didn't act like it. Now that they're in college they ARE acting like college students, and it's annoying as heck. Meet Veronica Mars Lite--neutered for the new CW.

But I think I might rewatch the show without the annoying commercials. The entire hour was packed with what are best referred to as "commercials for girly crap." They had scenes analyzed by these "Aeire" chicks from American Eagle--and I have no idea why. Just girls sitting around squealing about crap. Then there were the commercials for sports tampons (and how are they different? honestly? Other than probably costing more?) and tons of commercials for the emaciated stars of America's Next Top Model.

This WAS an intelligent show, once upon a time, but if they're going to "girly-fy" it, then I'm quite honestly not interested. You can be girly and smart all at the same time, but the new CW doesn't seem to think so, and that's a shame. (Or is it just the commercials? Or am I reading too much into it, thinking that the commercials changing this drastically mean that the show is now being aimed at a new more specific target audience that I'm just flat out not part of?)

on error...

Doing the reading that would be due Monday....

My third year of college I took an editing class. In that class we learned a style guide-- Words Into Type-- that was being used to edit a journal published in the department. It was a pretty cool class, especially since our final was editing a document submitted to the journal using that guide, where grading consisted of comparing our versions to what she actually did and then discussing it.

Ever since then, my immediate response to error is "Well, standard english doesn't really exist. Those damn comma rules change from style guide to style guide. So all those nitpicky things? Who really gives a crap anyway? You can do it completely right according to one guide, and then turn around and have it be completely wrong by another." So yeah, why bother?

My second year of teaching one of the grad students had complained long enough and hard enough that we were finally going to have to pick a handbook to use in the course. I looked through them, but ultimately somehow (whoops) never turned in the form to order one. My students' papers were no worse than the people whose had, and who had spent weeks on grammar in class.

I just don't think it's my job to teach people how to spell, or to teach them grammar (especially when "proper grammar" varies so wildly). I DO help students that are having obvious problems--subject/verb agreement, double negatives used often (and not to make a point), and so on, but I'm not going to sit there and lecture about it. Goodness knows we all got enough of that in grade school!

But error, or percieved error, is how people outside english departments judge writing (and even speaking). I had an ex (and yes, this is why he's an ex) who picked up a copy of my thesis and corrected the entire thing with red pen--entirely against the style guide I'd decided on by my committtee, then went and "helped" by making these changes on my computer when I wasn't home (I had a back up, but he still wasn't ever allowed back in my house). Instructors in other departments see error only--after all, the paper they assigned might not even allow for creativity so ideas might not be on their grading rubric! And lastly, the current boy and his dad harassed me so much any time "irregardless" or "hopefully" came out of my mouth that I've eliminated the first entirely and am working on the second.

So to recap:
1. Standard english is defined in a bunch of different ways, so there is no one right version, and I let students know about style guides instead of lecturing on proper grammar
2. People outside the university do judge on correctness though, and I have no idea how to respond to that. How do you deal with all the people out there that think grammar is all that matters because they were TAUGHT that grammar is a sign of a good writer and that it is all that matters?

new media vs. writing

So maybe somebody can clear something up for me now that would likely be cleared up later in the term anyway....

I've been lead to believe (and really not by Jeff, so maybe I'm wrong, but through my own research and through the two texts that I am reviewing) that students are being asked in the real world to both read and construct "texts" that aren't just writing. They have to be able to read visuals, internet sites, multimedia, whatever, and that composing in these genres is also seen as somewhat important in comp/rhet right now. In other words, students need to gain an understanding of new media or multimodal literacy practices as well as ordinary composing practices (I'm probably saying this horribly, so bear with me) and that since they are unlikely to get that anywhere else, and because there are compeling pedagogical reasons to do so anyway, these sorts of projects are being phased into composition courses (damn that was a long sentence).

Projects like the one that Jeff described in class today (and his insistence that theses and 5 paragraph essays aren't necessary) are part of this train of thought--we need to mix up what composition has always done to communicate in the digital world. Heck, we probably should have done so a long time ago but quite honestly there's no time like the present (so yes, despite defending the 5P in certain situations, I DON'T LIKE TEACHING IT, AT ALL. Amazing neh? But you write one thing and everybody thinks that's ALL you think. That's one thing I hate about blogging.) Anyway, we need to mix up composition. We need to rethink assignments. We need to think about multimodal projects.

So um, this class I'm designing? Students are going to write in it, a lot. But I'd like to get them thinking multimodally too, and things like a physical mapping project are some ways I've seen other instructors do that. Thinking about all the ways of communicating, and playing with them, might be a goal of such a classroom.

But is this goal "acceptable?" If my students make a skit, or write a story, or make a physical project, or a website, or make a visual argument, are they writing enough? If they're writing blogs and some major essay assignment or another, and they are writing essays about every part of their composing process and then one after the project is done, damn that's a LOT of writing. I'm perfectly fine leaving some of it out (or putting it in their blogs or message board or whatever I decide to use).

Maybe that's not my question at all, maybe my question is:
Are multimodal projects enough like writing to permit them in THIS composition course?

different ways of knowing

So what do you know? And what matters about what you do know in school?

I'm feeling a little culture shocked here, to be honest, in respect to what "matters" and what really doesn't. When I was redoing my vita I was suddenly struck by the idea that in a program where lit and creative writing are somewhat "important," the things I've done in relation to them somehow are important too.

I can't explain how strange it is when you go from the environment where "that theater crap you do" goes from being extra curricular to being a line on your vita. Sure, I've written plays and had them produced. But is that something important academically? I suppose it could be, if a position were ever open in something random like comp and play writing (and I've seen weirder appointments available since some universities seem to be combining positions to cut costs, and well, this little academic would gladly write plays for tenure if she had to!)

It's even stranger for "that reading you do" to somehow be related to this "canon" thing that I've not heard squat about since high school. I feel like I've missed out on something by reading for pleasure--yep, even literature--and not constantly taking notes on things. The only lit course I've had in years was a class on Chaucer, and I had already been through the Canterbury Tales twice at that point so it was easy, easy, easy. I read Troilus and Cressida for my final essay for something to do, some way to set myself apart in that course. But that's probably the only academic *fiction* reading I've done in years.

In reality, I know that these are all "different ways of knowing" the same thing. But I wonder if there's much common ground for somebody who reads for fun or writes creatively and furtively on the side and under cover (after having been told these aren't academic pursuits) to actually have a conversation? Can a canon nazi appreciate other ways or knowing? Can a free spirit ever be taught the importance of canon?

So yeah, crap. Feeling slightly out of place, longing for the days when coursework is over and I can emmerse myself in Feenberg and Haraway again. Wondering, somewhat, just how I'm going to accomplish that. And so on.