anxiety dreams, migraines and a much needed day off

This week I had a dream that my Henry James final paper literally tried to kill me. I am sure that is a totally normal dream, and I am a completely well-adjusted human person. Aside from dreaming of words coming off a page to strangle me, a personal crisis made the start of this week as stressful as I can imagine. Everything has worked out in that department, and I think I am fully recovered from the shock and agony. That being said, I spent the entire week housing my very first migraine. What a terrible house guest. My students noticed the change in my behavior, and instead of being angelic teenagers, they piled on to the tune of 30 students not completing a final draft, and another 20 who did not include any sources or Works Cited page. Considering a big part of the grading rubrics was implementation of sources, it has made it incredibly difficult to know if they learned a fucking thing during the last four weeks.

Such is the life of a public school high school teacher. All of that added up to a much needed sick day. I took Thursday off to recover, and it was glorious. I slept, watched like five episodes of the Great British Baking Show, and even cooked a nice dinner for my wife and I when I got home from TCC class. You may ask why I took Thursday and not Friday, thus giving me a 3-day weekend. That is an excellent question. Wednesday of this coming week is the AP Literature exam, and Thursdays I do not have my AP Literature students, but Friday I do, and I would have felt I was doing them a disservice missing one of their last days before the exam.

Two more weeks of my first semester of grad school. Everyone in my life thinks I am insane for tackling everything I am planning to tackle in the next year. Maybe I am, but I am going to conquer it. Well, if I can figure out my damn assessment plan for TCC I will conquer it all. For some reason I cannot seem to crack this thing. I use backwards design at the high school level all of the time, and I should be able to do this easily, but every time I sit down to do it, I stare aimlessly at the computer for like an hour, then type for a bit, then delete everything, cuss out loud a bunch, then slam my Chromebook shut. It really is the thing standing between me and having a solid draft of my portfolio.  

New Media Pedagogy response

At my school I am known as the teacher banging the technology drum the loudest. My high school is further behind in the technology department than most other schools, and while we have Common Core mandates asking us to push "21st century skills", it feels like a hallow question when we do not have the available technology to make it happen. This year I have been removed from three meetings for being too insistent on using funds for technology. Well, last week I got word that the school is adding over 200 Chromebooks next year. Each department is getting a roving cart of them and the English department is getting two carts. So, I am not getting my classroom set of iPads, but I did push us forward, so that is great. It almost feels like kismet that we would read the New Media Pedagogy section this week.

I want to focus on a small section of this chapter. The second point under the New Media Principles and Attitudes is "New media functions as a writer's laboratory, a site of experimentation." The second I read this section, I realized how a traditional classroom set up is the antithesis of a site of experimentation. Classroom set up is an intense topic at the high school level. Go into five different classrooms and you can find five different classroom set ups with five different explanations why the classroom is set up in those specific ways. Because I have a strong belief in New Media Pedagogy, Activity Theory, and Collaborative writing, I am on the search for the classroom set up that marries those three better. I approached the principal about ditching desks in favor of tables and chairs, and I am currently researching options. This is among the most excited I have been. I think by giving students work space, I can encourage invention and experimentation, as well as collaboration. Many high school teachers look at aspects of technology, phones, wifi, etc, as a distraction, but students have their phone out all of the time in my class. They are googling things, sharing information with each other, taking notes, etc. I am already envisioning a more tech friendly year next year.

It is strange though that I was hesitant to push my New Media belief hard into my proposed syllabus for this course. I am not sure why that is. I think it has a lot to do with the access challenges. At the high school level I can have the computer every day for a week or two to complete a major assignment because I have them five days a week, but at the college level that will not be the case. I cannot assume students will have access, and that makes me hesitant to push myself fully into the New Media realm. With access issues, one also has issues of the steep learning curve many students who have not been privileged enough to have computers around their whole lives. Assigning web assignments could prove doubly difficult for those students.

I believe it is important for students to have interactions online, and with all sorts of new media because that is where the world is going. My high school students do not read articles, they do not read the newspaper, and many do not watch the news, they watch Youtube videos. They do not journal, they vlog. They need to understand what these avenues of learning have in terms of value, and they need to know how to read them, access them, and master them.

Can we call this the home stretch?

Not saying I am looking forward to summer or anything, but my summer reading books are sitting on my nightstand cheering me on. I am supposed to be downsizing in the book department, but we can't all be successes at everything. These last two weeks have certainly been trying. My anxiety level has been turned up to 11. Between the standardized testing and the re-accreditation process at the high school, and the reality of how much work there is left to do at Sac State, I cannot remember the last home cooked meal I had. Cooking is typically such a stress relief for me, but it is time consuming, and right now there is too much Henry James and Anthony Trollope to read for me to cook my usual health conscious meals. My wife's sudden illness has not been helping in that department either.

While I have had my juniors over the last few weeks, we have been doing rhetorical analysis, a unit I slapped together when I realized April was kind of a shitty month for us at school. I had this whole project idea where students would pick a problem they would like to raise awareness of, pick three different audiences that problem affects, and then create three different texts, one for each audience. In theory it sounded fantastic. The problem was, it never got off the ground. This week our FHA students were at a conference, our marching band, choir, and color guard were in Disneyland, two of our sports teams had tournaments, we had Farm Day recently. My classroom was too empty to get anything meaningful done, so instead, we took our problems and turned them into rants. For an entire day, I gave my remaining students a platform to vent frustrations, to complain about whatever was on their minds. It turns out that people do not ask teenagers what is bothering them all that often, and it led to some pretty emotional outbursts. These complaints ranged from the disgusting nature of school lunches (a student actually started a petition after venting), frustrations at another teacher's texts not being on the stuff they actually cover in class, pressures of college, to global issues of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and most commonly, sexism. Multiple young ladies told stories of older men following them, grabbing at them, or stories of school teachers and administrators excusing some pretty awful boy behavior towards girls by saying "Boys will be boys" and telling the girl she probably should not wear whatever she was wearing to attract these disgusting things.

It was all very healing for the students, but enraging for me. To know that I work alongside so many people who are perpetuating these ideas I rail against so frequently was a bitter pill to swallow. I was left emotionally drained, angry, and like nothing I can say or do can change the culture of this backwards thinking community. On the plus side, the students were made more aware of the issues that face young women, and they all felt safe and comfortable in my class to speak up. If I can continue to provide that, I think I am doing my job.

The next challenge is going to be my African American Experience unit with Raisin in the Sun as my primary text. The racism in this community is thick. I have to be ready for some backlash.

Wrestling with Activity Theory

Activity Theory, or as I understand it, the igniter to the Project Based Learning philosophy that has had a wild fire like spread through public education, is of particular interest to me. I have spent the three years of my teaching career looking for ways I can implement more of the philosophies of Activity Theory into my classroom. I have entire folders dedicated to stories, articles, blog, ideas, etc., that all surround the idea the we learn by doing, not by sitting listening to someone tell us what to do. I am not sure what this looks like at the college level, but at the high school level it looks like a ton of different things, but they have one thing in common; they cost money. Public high schools do not like to spend money, and so I have done modified versions of these things.

One of the challenges of Activity Theory I think, is that there is a lot more upfront work for the instructor. It makes it seem like it is so much more difficult, but the reality is, once the front loaded work is done, the instructor takes sort of a backseat. I first became interested in the ideas in my teaching credential program when I was assigned to give a presentation on Lev Vygotsky, and decided to center my presentation around the Zone of Proximal Development. This became the driving force in my personal teaching philosophy at the high school level. Everything I did started with Me doing an activity, then the class doing it, then small groups it, then the individual doing it. Even that though, did not do it for me. I felt I was still lecturing too much, creating too many lecture slides, and having too much rote note taking going on.

Now, if you came into my classroom, you will find almost no straight lecturing, and I have not used a single PowerPoint presentation this year. Students need to do things to learn them. School should be hands-on. I am even in the process of trying to get all of the desks removed from my classroom and replaced with tables and chairs, so the students have more space to do things.

The struggle I am having is thinking about using this idea in a writing course. I see how it works for projects and presentations, but in the scope of crafting essays, or other written genres, I am unsure how to translate this theory. I guess I need to keep thinking about it!

Week 9? 10? 1000000? Who knows anymore

On Monday morning a student asked me how I was doing and I responded with "Well, I'm glad it's Friday" so that is where I am in my life. The days are blurry, and obscured my own anxieties of finishing strong. Finishing the school year strong as an educator, and as a grad student. Most days I feel lucky if I leave the house with my pants and shoes on. It is currently 9 in the morning, and I have been sitting at Starbucks since it opened at 5 getting all of the reading for Teaching College Comp for next week. From here I will go to Barnes and Noble to pick up AP books so I have new practice exams to go through my students for the last 13 school days before the big exam. After that, I will sit in my apartment, spread out my 10 sources for the Literature Review for my Henry James class due Wednesday, and start piecing it together. I imagine I will eat some food at some point, and if I am lucky, I will be able to stop working by about 9pm, go to the gym, then come home, put a movie on (feeling like a Zombieland re-watch might be in order) and fall asleep, just to get up at 5am tomorrow to get all of the work for my Anthony Trollope class done.

I have also started piecing my syllabus together for AP Language and Composition (a class which gets some mention on next week's readings for TCC) with an eye towards FYC. As it is customary for students who get a 4 or 5 on the AP exam to be exempt from FYC courses, I want to fashion my course in a similar way to how I will fashion a FYC course, but still teaching the complexities of the AP exam, and doing the regular job of a high school English teacher. The delicate balance is proving complicated. I am meant to teach book length texts, and I have 4 that I am all prepared to use, but I want to make sure the students are introduced to a wide variety of texts from multiple genres as well. I am a person who, it turns out, finds a sense of calm in the crafting of syllabi. It is the same sense of calm I get when doing a puzzle. My mind enjoys trying to make all of the pieces fit. Is there a job where I can just get paid to create syllabi all day every day?

Okay, off to the bookstore, where I have been given strict orders from my wife to not buy anymore books to add to my summer reading as we are supposed to be downsizing, but in the last 3 weeks I have purchased 12 books.

Engaging with Haswell

Perhaps it is too strong a word to say that this week's readings come as a form kismet to my life. My academic pursuits smashed directly into my career this week. As I was reading all about feedback and assessment, I was in the process of providing feedback to my students on their third drafts of their career essays. On Monday I collected roughly 80 drafts (out of 96 students, that is pretty good for this year), and I have until Monday to read them all. 80 drafts over 7 days, gives me about 12 drafts a day to read. This is down significantly from last year when I had roughly 20 drafts to read a day. 12 drafts a day does not seem like a Herculean task, but while teaching from 8-3, then grad school from either 4:30-9:20 or 4:30-5:45, it can be difficult to cram those 12 drafts in. This is why I devoured Haswell's article. I am always looking for a way to provide meaningful feedback, in an efficient and quick manner.

For the bad drafts, the system we have at school works pretty well. It is supposed to take 5 minutes to grade each essay, using a numbering system and correlates with a piece of paper each student has. When I see a mistake, I put a number next to that mistake and the student can see what that mistake is. However, there is no room for praising solid ideas in this system. There are no numbers that correspond with things done well. Because of this, I always take longer than 5 minutes because I include an ending comment for ideas that are too difficult to articulate with a number. In all honesty, the number system we have works incredibly well for level 1 errors, but idea level errors are difficult to apply a numerical system to.

Haswell's article makes mention of this idea that there is a disconnect between what instructors mean on a comment and what students interpret those comments to mean. I have been thinking about this all week because, while Turnitin.com has a short hand system that helps explain what those comments mean, I hate reading drafts/papers on a screen, so I prefer handwritten comments. I have taken recently to making most of my comments questions that I want the students to answer in their essay. For example, for this current career essay, students could chose 1 of 3 prompts: they could research their dream career and write an informative essay about it, they could research multiple careers and write a comparative essay, or they could forgo the career aspect and write an essay about the types of traveling they would like to do, backed by research about the places they want to visit. If the student wrote "There are some downsides to this job" but did not explain them, I used to write "Elaborate" and move on, but now I write "Can you tell me some of the specific downsides to the job?" Then in my end comment I remind them to answer all of the questions through their essay, while pointing out what I liked, what worked, etc.

I think this method gels with Haswell because I think it gets rid of that disconnect. It takes me a few minutes longer per draft, but I am hopeful the final products will be stronger.

Reflection on the week that was

 Last week was the all-important high school Spring Break, and instead of it being a time of joyful merriment the way I expected, it was marred by my car getting broken into via some punks smashing my back window and making off with $1,700.00 worth of my wife's stuff. Then dealing with insurance and police, and all of that noise, I was actually looking forward to being back in the classroom this week, only to be confronted with multiple classes full of students who tell me they are never going to college so why should they try hard on my essay. On top of that, I had a yearbook deadline to meet.

The saving grace was news that I will get to attend an AP Language Summer Institute and apply the knowledge I have gained from Teaching College Composition AND the AP Language institute to make myself a better all around teacher next year. I am trying hard to not look too far forward, but this course has given me a treasure trove of ideas on how to teach a course that, frankly, scares me. I even talked myself out of teaching it two years ago because I did not feel ready.

I am a bit concerned the next six or seven weeks might break me. Between my two lit class finals, and trying to craft a portfolio for TCC, then doing all of my work for my job, I wonder if I bit off too much. I guess I will find out in June!

Reflection on Anson

Part of the Process Pedagogical belief involves peer revision, and that is the part I found myself focusing on. A student centered classroom is a big part of my personal high teaching pedagogy and a chunk of that belief involves peer revision. The problem I am having with all of the pedagogical approaches is that none of them help me in the practical sense. What do you do when a majority of your class is simply not in the position to provide solid feedback? And when I say "in the position" I mean they are either struggling too mightily on their own, or refuse to participate, or did not bring their own work in to be revised, making it difficult for the process to be meaningful.

I absolutely believe that the process of writing can be taught, and I believe that the process of writing is vitally important, and I believe in multiple drafts, and giving feedback on drafts, and allowing time to rewrites, but what happens when you have a classroom full of unmotivated students who do not believe those same things. This year I have encountered my roughest classes in my short teaching career, and as I have documented here previously, I have changed many aspects of my class this year, including process points. For every draft the students turn in, they get points. It has not helped much. For example, we are in a writing unit currently where the students got to choose any career and research it and write an informative paper, or they can write a comparative essay on two or three career, and I broke it down in the following way.

1st step: Brainstorm what types of things they should look at when thinking about a career

2nd step: Pick a topic and research it in class.

3rd step: share topic and 2 interesting initial research items learned

4th step:  Do more research at home

5th step: Bring in a first draft for peer revision

6th step: Bring in a second draft for different peers to revise

7th step: Bring in third draft for me to grade

8th step: Hand back drafts with final due date 10 days away.

This is as step by step as a process can be, and at each step, they get points. By the time we reached the 7th step (today), I had less than 60% of students turning in this draft. No matter how much we go over the importance of drafts, or how often I show them my own drafts and how they change, they still do not see the value. I was hoping Anson would help me in that department. I know expecting 100% is silly, but I need more than 60%.

Week 7 reflection

Not going to lie, the last thing I want to do is reflect on the week that was. Tragedy hit our high school campus this week, and I have not even begun to process my own feelings on it because I spent the last two days helping students process it. My first year on campus we had a teacher die unexpectedly, and I have helped students process the death of two students in three shorts years as well. I am not ill prepared for this type of thing, but it does not make it any less hard. How do you look at the faces of teenagers and tell them awful news without crying? You don't.

I forced myself to slow down and relax last night. After getting home from school and reading from one of the novels for one of my Lit classes until about 7pm, I forced myself to stop. My wife and I bought dinner, and watched movies until like one in the morning. It was the latest I had stayed up since New Year's Eve, and it was the longest I had gone without doing school work or lesson planning or grading since Sac State classes started in January. It took nearly one whole movie (Dark Places, based on a Gillian Flynn novel of the same name) to not feel guilty for taking the night off too. I also turned off my 6am Saturday alarm, which meant my usual Saturday routine was thrown out of whack. I needed a mental health morning, so I cut myself some slack to that end.

I went back to the regular school routine today. Prepping teaching Catcher in the Rye for my AP Lit class, putting the finishing touches on my expository writing unit for my regular eleventh grade classes, reading 100 pages of Portrait of a Lady, reading 60 pages of Phineas Finn, and I even started putting together my binder for my Into the Wild unit for next year's AP Language class, which is starting to take shape entirely based on the stuff we are doing in Teaching College Composition. Students who get a 4 or 5 on the AP exam will not take FYC at many schools, so I need to treat it like a FYC style class.

Oh last thing, after weeks of stressing out over observations, I finally have a professor who is not doing presentations during the week I have free to observe. I am going to have to pick up a third day another time, or I can see this professor teach a different FYC course during the same week, but not sure that works. Any way, during Spring break from Sac State I get to stay late at my high school to finish the yearbook due in two weeks, and during my spring break from high school, I get to get up early and do observations.

Okay actual last thing, none of this talking about being busy is me complaining. Eight years ago I was so depressed I did not get out of bed for four months. Being busy is way more awesome than that. Okay, I think it is time to go to my actual notebook journal now. Ta-Ta for now.

Responding to Hesse

In my life outside of the classroom (both as a teacher and student) I spent years and years performing in musical theater at the community theater level. Doing so brought me a whole host of delightful artistic friends. A few years back there was a massively successful song by Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and T.I. called "Blurred Lines" that the estate of Marvin Gaye thought had a baseline too similar to a Gaye track, and they sued for writing credit and tons of money worth of royalties. The Gaye family won the case, and it was the cause of a ton of conversations between my musician friends about ownership of a groove. To them, and to most people, "Blurred Lines" did not sample from the Marvin Gaye song, and to my friends, this set a dangerous precedent for ownership of anything that could possibly sound remotely like something else.

All of this is a way of me asking if ownership of writing is a good thing? As I read Hesse's delightful speech, I kept wondering if "Who Owns Writing?" is even a question we should be asking. In his piece Hesse makes a point of mentioning blogs and Wikis as newer types of text and writing with freer ownership. He uses the phrase "sanctioned knowledge" as the opposite of what Wikipedia allows. The use of sanctioned is especially important, because I think, in effect, he is wondering if writing should be owned either, or maybe what he is getting at is that ownership of writing needs to have a much more open definition. Ownership of writing implies mastery, but of what? Is there a certain type of writing that is valued higher in terms of ownership? One of the barriers I feel like I am constantly trying to break through with my students is the idea that writing does not have to be scary. But, one of the problems with writing through students' eyes is that they see ownership of writing as being something academic, and unfathomable to get control of.

The idea should be to take ownership of writing and show students that there are different levels of ownership, as well as a wide variety of writing ownership out there. Hesse touches on this when he wonders if the word "writing" is the problem. The act of writing causes anxiety for students, probably because they do not claim ownership of it. As an instructor, the goal should be to extend a kind of ownership to the students. I am still trying to figure out how. Does one have to attain mastery to have ownership? In my opening story, ownership means being the first one to create a generally used and accepted groove line, but there is no correlation to a groove line in writing, or is there? Does one have to understand a certain syntax before one can have ownership? These are the questions that fired in my head while reading the article and have stuck with me for a week since.

I begin a new expository writing unit with my eleventh graders tomorrow and as I reminded them all of that fact on Friday they groaned a groan so loud and heavy that I am still feeling it on my shoulders. They get to choose any career they want, research it, learn about it, then write about it. They love the idea of researching and learning about any career they want, but the minute I say write about it, or if I mention the final product is an essay, they freeze. I have 9 more weeks to try and help them take ownership of their writing.

Week 6 reflection

  At the end of the introduction to the Basic Writing Pedagogy chapter in the Guide to Composition Pedagogies book there is a list of five principles and practices for Basic Writing Pedagogy. The second I read the five things, I thought about ways to display those five things in my classroom as a reminder to both me and my students. Those five points get at the heart of what I try to do in my classroom to varying degrees of success. It is quite a juggling act, and I like to think that I am good at what I do.

This school year has tested my confidence though, and this course, and learning about composition pedagogies has helped me stay afloat in the rough waters of eleventh grade English. At the moment I am stuck on the idea of students finding value in what we do in the classroom. The biggest complaint I hear from high school students is that they are not learning skills to help them in their lives, and they struggle to understand the abstract way school prepares them for a job or for life as an adult. It has been eating away at me this year, causing me to second guess many of my assignments.

As I am mentoring a first year teacher, and she is following what I am teaching this year, we mapped things out at the start of the year, and it has been frustrating the last few weeks as I have thought of cool things to do because of this course, but I have to put them on the backburner for next year. This school year has roughly ten more weeks, and I am already planning a summer full of changing up my entire curriculum. Not exactly the relaxing summer non-teachers think teachers have.

I have been finding that focusing ahead has helped limit the anxiety of grad school on top of a full time teaching job. I am constantly worrying that one is going to suffer in order for me to do the other one well. So far, that balance has been fine, but last week I felt like I was neglecting my duties as a teacher, well, as a grader. The problem with grading is that it builds and it can feel insurmountable if you get behind. I have known plenty of teachers who have taken a day off from school to catch up on grading. Instead, I leveled with my students and told them to give me the two assignments out of the four that they felt represented their best learning, and they could keep the other two. It cut my work load in half, and allowed me to see what the students thought was important/their best work. Win/win right? Right?

In my professional life, I told myself Saturday night was my night. No matter how many papers I had to grade, or lessons to plan, or books to prep, Saturday nights were my night. Since grad school started, every Saturday night has been dedicated to school. My night is now Tuesday from 5:45-6:15, which is the length of time it takes me to leave Composition class, walk to my car, and drive home. I cherish that thirty minutes of solitude, and force myself to not think about anything. It is bliss. 

Genre Pedagogies

The Genre Pedagogies chapter spoke to the English teacher in me, especially looking at genre critiques. It gets right to the idea that everything is a text, which is a concept I try to teach. I was struck by Coe and Freedman’s list of “critical, meta-rhetorical questions.” Teaching students to look at why a particular genre is used in a particular way, or at a particular time, can foster deep critical thinking of what all texts can do. That first question of the aforementioned list “What sorts of communication does the genre encourage, what sorts does it constrain against?” gets directly at the big idea of studying texts in general. If a student can come to understand how to critique genre, as opposed to simply regurgitate a particular genre, the odds are increased that the student will be better able to approach unfamiliar genres.

Of course, the biggest hurdle that arises out of genre critiques, and out of education in a broad sense is the transfer of skills. Students are getting so much thrown at them that it can be difficult for them to comprehend how learning a concept in First Year Composition can help in Biology. I see it on a daily basis with my students. The three points laid out by the chapter through Anne Beaufort’s case study are a wonderful place to start, but ultimately buy-in is always going to be the biggest hurdle. Reflective writing, not just on what they wrote, but on how and why they wrote can work well, but if the students are not convinced it is important, reflective writing is not going to help.

That being said, I find myself drawn to the idea of designing a course around many of the concepts found in genre pedagogy, because it works in my AP literature class as well as my regular English classes, and will work in AP Language next year. In fact, it is right up the alley of AP Language. 

week 5 reflection

Fiction colors my life. My bookshelves are 95% fiction. My DVD collection is probably 98% fiction. Last year I read 45 books and 42 of them were fiction. A big goal of mine for 2016 was to consume more nonfiction. I am watching 1 documentary a week, and reading as much nonfiction as my busy life allows. It just so happens that all of this lines up with this Teaching College Composition course. I never once considered teaching fiction as part of a composition course until Professor Hayes said something about it like a week or so ago. It also coincides with the decision of the English department at my school to have me take over the AP Language and Composition course next year, meaning all of this nonfiction consumption is going to come in handy. It also means this Teaching College Composition course is going to have a serious impact on my teaching next year. In fact, the material I will be producing for this class is shaping my syllabus for next year's course.

I have my four major nonfiction texts picked out already, and I ran into the same problem with AP Language as I did with AP Literature; a majority of the recommended texts are by straight white dudes. It is frustrating to be confronted with this everywhere I turn. I did manage to get one text by a white woman, and one text by a black woman in my major texts. I will definitely be doing more supplemental materials from underrepresented groups of people.

I am finding myself in discussions about inclusiveness on a nearly daily basis. Just yesterday my friend and I were talking about the use of language like "black film" as if that somehow means films without qualifiers are the standard and that standard is white. I have too many students who do not see the problem with white-washing, or the problem with the fact that women have almost no chance to direct big budget films, or do not see the problem with stereotypical characters because they are funny. I believe it is a huge part of my job to try and help open their eyes to some of the injustices in our world, not just the super big things like overt KKK style racism, or idiocy of Men's Rights Activists, but the more covert issues that color our world.

I find myself exhausted at the struggle, but then I think about the struggle People of Color, women and the LGTBQ community goes through on a daily basis, and it reminds me how lucky I am. It also reminds me I have to do my part to show my students that the voices of the underrepresented matter, and if that means Straight White Dude voices, like mine, have to be silent for a little bit, that is okay. That was weird to write because as I type up this blog post, I am using my Straight White Dude voice.

Cultural Studies and Composition

This week's Cultural Studies reading spoke to me in meaningful ways. It does seem that a Cultural Studies element should exist in a composition classroom. Both as a way to allow more students to connect to the course and as a way to keep composition relevant as the world's texts move forward at a rapid rate. One of the passages that had me nodding me head in agreement and saying "YES" loudly as I read in a Starbucks was "treating popular texts as if they merited the same degree of attention and appreciation of canonical texts" (99). This got to me because in my real life as a High School English teacher, the CANON is akin to the holy Bible, but it is problematic to me because a majority of canonical texts are written by Dead White Guys, and were placed in the CANON by, you know, other Dead White Guys. As education desires inclusion, and as colleges admit a more diverse population, sticking to texts written by Dead White Guys presents a multitude of issues.

When popular texts are given the same weight as canonical texts, it allows for professors to find texts that represent the widening student body, and find texts to which young people can connect. As someone who tried to teach The Scarlet Letter two years in a row, I can tell you that the themes and ideas in that text were big hits with my students, but the book itself was mostly unread. What good does it do a teacher/professor to assign texts to be read, if a majority of students refuse to read it or simply cannot read it. In my teaching of that book, I had to find articles, videos, audio, blog posts, etc on the same subject to help guide my students along.

Another important reason for Cultural Studies to have influence over a composition course that goes along with the passage I posted, is that it redefines the power structure, which is something about which I am passionate. The Straight White Male perspective has long been the default perspective, and it is long due for a change. By incorporating a wide variety of texts for students to read, and by being more inclusive in general, it gives the diverse population of students more of a chance to experience different perspectives. By showing our students inclusive voices, it opens up their own abilities to express themselves in unique ways.

In the AP Literature course I am currently teaching, I find myself increasingly frustrated that a majority of the recommended texts are written by Dead White Guys. Because I want my students to be as prepared as possible, I am teaching 5 major texts from Dead White Guys, but also 1 major text from a woman, and 2 major texts from People of Color. Also, 90% of the poetry we go over is written from someone other than a Dead White Guy. As a student of AP Literature I read pretty much only canonical works and it was not until college that my eyes were opened to a wider variety of texts. I do not want my students to go away to college only having the Dead White Guy perspective. It is imperative on me to help students disrupt the power structure in all texts.

Week 4 reflection

In the next few weeks I am preparing to start my next big writing assignment in class. I am trying to incorporate some of the ideas from the Bean text into the assignment. Starting a new writing intensive unit is always a big of a challenge because students are so resistant to writing in a formal way. Trying to balance the things I am learning in this class with the Common Core State Standards, and the Bi-Laws of my school, which require a certain amount of pages for essays during a school year can be a complex series of challenges in its own way.

This week I ran into a former student at Sac State for the first time. He is the first one to go to college in his family line. We chatted for a bit about the transition from high school to college, but mostly we talked about writing because he said he wished he had taken writing more seriously in high school because there is so much of it at the college level. I am trying to figure out how to make students aware that those who are going to college are going to face writing in more than just English and history class, but until they are actually in college, they never think about, so not only do I need to teach writing better, I need to help them see why learning how to write is important outside of English class. And when I think about that too much, I want to curl up and take a long nap. 

Response to Rose

I felt this article on a deep level because it is something I grapple with on a daily basis in my job as a high school English teacher. For many of my students writing feels exclusionary. Whether it is the language barrier many of my immigrant students feel, or the fear of grammar rules they either never quite learned, or just cannot seem to remember. They look at writing as something smart people do, and they do not feel smart. This exclusionary barrier bleeds over into college, where many of my students are the first person in their families to go. Many feel they lack the skills necessary to write at the college level, so I often find myself wrestling with this word skill. When Rose says “In the case of writing, the skills should be mastered before one enters college and takes on higher-order endeavors. And the place for such instruction-before or after entering college-is the English class. Yes, the skill can be refined, but its fundamental development is over…”(8), I cringed because I do not know what that looks like. What does mastery of a skill of writing look like? I am a pretty skilled writer with a degree in English, who teaches writing every day, and I do not think I have mastered it. I am thirty-five years old, so how can I expect my sixteen year old students to master this skill.

 This article makes me think about Forced Learning. Students who are scared of writing have a hard time learning because it feels forced. They are struggling with confidence, then they have to take in all of this other information, much of which slips through them, landing them in remediation, a word with such a stigma, I get students who try to take AP Language who have no business taking it because on the off chance that they will get a four or five on the exam would mean that for many of them, they would not have to take a college composition course and possibly end up in a remedial class which they have to pay for, but does not count for college credit towards graduation. This is the perfect way to exclude poor students who struggle to pay for college in the first place.

 It is tough to see how this plays out in the long haul because I think it requires an overhaul in our entire educational system, but also in the job market. Some people were not meant to go to college, but we keep shoving that idea down their throats, so they get in, struggle to pay for it, end up in remedial classes, then dropout feeling like failures. It is a vicious cycle, and it is something I spend too much time thinking about.

Week 3 reflection

I am currently writing this reflection with a fever of over 100 degrees, on what is supposed to be a week off from teaching, so you will have to pardon if this reflection is either slightly incoherent, or just a bit hazy. My body is pumped full of some good stuff at the moment. This course has got me thinking a lot about restructuring my high school classroom for next year, which I have talked about in both of my reflections already. What I realized the last week after reading chapters 3 and 4 of the Bean text is just how wide open composition really is. It is not just about writing essay after essay, it is teaching writing in a variety of genres. Instinctively I know that there are different genres of writing, and I teach a wide selection of writing, but I have always made the essay the most impactful piece of writing, and I am seeing now that is actually problematic. Instead of looking at other genres of writing as the pre-writing, or the "filler" writing, it is time to make those types of writing as important. It has opened up a whole new world of curriculum to me for next year. Though I got into high school teaching to teach literature, the reality of high school is that the focus is shifting away from literature analysis, and to types of writing applicable to students who are going to college or to a job. It is exciting and exhausting to think about.

Week 3 response

As with anything else in this world, I am weary of choosing one or the other, in this debate between outer-directed theorists, and inner-directed theorists. It makes sense to me, that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. During class on Thursday, our group discussed how we felt that box 1 and box 2 on the Flower and Hayes model, needed to be less boxy, and dropped into the second model, and then maybe we have something we can all work with. Each discourse community comes with its own set of distinct conceptual structures, and its own language, so it would make sense that much of what we learn, and how we learn, has to come from external factors. Yet, in terms of teaching composition, we have to be aware that our students are visiting different discourse communities, and it is virtually impossible for us, as instructors to get our students well-versed in every single one, so we do need to be able to teach the students how to spot the intricacies of discourse communities, and doing so involves a heuristic approach. If not a literal checklist, at least a set of tools the students can use to identify within their internal processes, to move from discourse community to discourse community without feeling lost. One of the concepts in the Bizzell article that stands out to me is that the writer must be able to define goals in terms of the interpretive conventions of that specific community. I think, then, the aim of teaching a composition course, should be to give students the tools to be able to identify conventions when they find themselves in a new discourse community. I am not as interested in the deeply theoretical, as I am in how to make the theoretical applicable in the classroom. As a side note, I always assumed composition courses were all about essay writing, so the Bean has opened up so much more to me.

Week 2 reflections

A professor I had never met until this week thinks I am crazy for trying to teach full time and take three courses for the Master's program. He is proving to be right. It has been an insane week, however, it has also been a week full of pure learning. In my two lit courses I have already learned so much to help the students in the AP literature course I teach. The critical pieces of writing are helping to resharpen my mind in terms of looking at books as more than simply words on paper. We are digging deep into our current text, Things Fall Apart, with the help of critical essays. On the composition side, the John C. Bean text has opened my eyes to realizing how much more I can be doing to help my students with writing. My brain is moving in a ton of different directions now, and it has been stressful, but also fun. The problem I am running into is time management, of course. But, I am also running into this issue of wanting to do it all. I want to completely overhaul my curriculum for next school year. My brain has shifted over to next school year already. It is crazy how much of my time is spent planning the future classes, fixing all of the things that are not currently working. On top of my regular teaching and Sac state load, I am also planning to teach AP Language next year, something I have never done, as well as writing a complex yearbook class curriculum with the hope of submitting it to the UC system to get the class approved for their A-G high school graduation credit. All the while trying to lose 35 pounds this year, get my novel published, and continue writing fiction in the hopes of jump starting a fiction career I put of for a decade out of fear. It's a big time in my life. I know in the next few years kids will be a reality, but I feel like that's a post for my actual journal.

Responding to Sommers

"The Experienced writers see their revision process as a recursive process-a process with significant recurring activities-with different levels of attention and different agenda for each cycle." (Sommers, 386) The looming question after reading this article stems from the above passage: How does one transition from a novice writer to an experienced writer? Is it simply the amount of time one has been writing? The amount one has written in a lifetime? Is there a specific process that exists that moves a writer from novice to experienced? according to the case study Sommers completed, "student" writers look at revisions as a process of strengthening vocabulary and deleting words or fixing grammar, but not massive overhauls. Students are looking at the economy of time. They think about how quickly they can make a few surface level changes to satisfy the requirements of a second or third draft. Essentially they write one draft and then tinker with it a little bit. I immediately thought about my own classroom. What do I do to foster the idea that deep level changes in writing are important. How can I change my process having read Sommers' article? First thing I did was get rid of the peer review worksheet. Next thing I did was ask the class what the word revision means to them. This was an enlightening few minutes. For an overwhelming majority of students the revision process has never been made important. They look at as a box to check in the writing process to fulfill a requirement for the teacher. During our group time, I mentioned to my group that I do not remember learning how to do true revisions to essays. I am sure I learned at some point, but I do not remember when I realized that the revision process was, as Sommers points out, recursive. This is the crux of revisions. There has to be a way to show students that rough drafts are meant to be mounds of play-doh, from which they shape into a final product. It is not the final product minus a pinch of reshaping. The idea is not the mound, the draft is the mound. This is where I am now. In another few weeks my students will begin the essay writing process over again. I need to show students the importance of reordering and addition, not simply deletion, or word choice corrections. If only Sommers' article had included the magic pill of answers.

Week 1 reflection

Man, this is quite an undertaking. Teaching high school full-time and starting an MA program as a full-time student at the same time is not for the weary, though it has left me weary after one week. I have to admit that financial aide issues are the reason I find myself in Teaching College Composition, but already I find myself invigorated by the course. Mostly because it is the course I am taking that has the most immediate effect on my day job. It has already got my thinking of how I can better serve my students in the area of writing. I need to figure out a new system because my current one is leaving behind too many students. It is tough not to get bogged down in the conventions of writing, even as the new Common Core Standards emphasize that ideas are more important than conventions. I want to buy into that thought, and maybe this class will help me reconcile my reluctance. Professor's Hayes enthusiasm for the subject of teaching writing is certainly helping, as well. After a long day, it is nice to sit in a classroom and let someone else have the energy. I have been thinking about the question he posed: Why is college composition important? I have a few answers to this question because I get asked "Why is writing important" at least 209 times a school year. The real problem lies, not in answering the question, the real problem lies in the problems with convincing teenagers it is important for all of the reasons I lay out. Every year former students come back and say "I wish I had paid more attention in your class, especially with writing." I ask them to tell my current students that, but it rarely helps. The student who is brilliant at math cannot see how writing will help him in his life because high school math requires so little writing. It can be defeating.

Reader Response to Faigley

It is impossible for me to separate these two parts of myself, as I read "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal." There is the part of me that teaches high school and reads this in that context. While none of my English Teacher Prep classes said anything to me about having a process for teaching writing, I instinctively knew I needed one when I started teaching three years ago. I needed to make sure that all of my students were playing the same game, which is essentially what the importance of having a process to teach writing is. Then there is the side of me who is a student learning the names of these processes for the first time. For me, being able to put a name to them has been liberating. It allows me to realize that the process I have been teaching has been a mishmash of the three processes Faigley lays out in the article. Teaching writing is the hardest part of my job. Tougher than classroom management, tougher than teenage apathy, and certainly tougher than literature analysis. Because it is impossible for me to separate these two parts of myself for now, and it may always be so, I am going to look at these three processes through the prism of teaching at the high school level. The Expressive View: Faigley cites D. Gordon Rohman as saying that the definition of "good writing" is about integrity, spontaneity, and originality. It is not surprising that this is considered a Romantic notion, because it sound dreamy. I believe it is the dream that good writing can burst forth in moments of spontaneity, but I have found that in my experience, spontaneous writing in the classroom is rarely quality writing. The Expressive view does not seem practical in a classroom of students for whom writing feels second language acquisition. Spontaneous writing works in small doses, as a way to activate the brain, but in my experience, does not produce meaningful, coherent and cohesive writing. Cognitive View: Reading through this process I found myself nodding repeatedly. Instinctively this where my current teaching philosophy resides in terms of writing. It is not my belief that is the optimal way to write because it feels like it can handcuff growing writers to stick to a specific type of essay. Breaking teenagers out of the five-paragraph essay is a yearlong process, but the pre-writing, mapping, brainstorming, help struggling students more than anything else. The key is teach them that these structures are not set in stone. One thing I find pleasing about the cognitive view is that it helps students with their organization. Social View: I have been grappling with the social view for days now, and I have come to the conclusion that I am stumped. I am not sure if I cannot see how it works because of my high school teacher lens, or if I am just not able to come to a solid understanding of its meaning. One thing that stood out to me was this idea that there can be no expert writer. I am not quite sure what it means, but based around the text, it would appear that since writing comes from one's own culture and home, that there is no way we can judge every writer on the same scale. I have not come to any grand conclusions about what my future teaching process will be. I have to think that whatever it is, there will be a way to combine aspects of the three of these processes, because my short career of teaching has already shown me that no two students learn to write the same way.