Teaching Journal #12

Wednesday we covered Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” and “Conceptualizing Composing as a Woman.” I ended up deviating quite a bit from my lesson plan during that lecture. For instance, I scrapped my planned freewriting exercise in favor of doing an online quiz (recommended by some of my peers) as a class to explore gender differences in writing. The quiz offered a sample paragraph from an author and we had to guess the gender of the author. I was able to get a good deal of discussion out of my students on what characteristics are representative of “female” writing versus “male” writing, which was one of the goals I wanted to achieve in that class. This opened the door for discussion on gendered genres later in the class.

 

In addition, engaging the class as a whole from the very beginning (rather than splitting them up into groups) proved to be helpful in promoting whole class discussion throughout the rest of the lecture. I am not sure if this was a fluke; I feel like extenuating circumstances are more likely to determine whether my students participate or not, but in any case I was glad of the result.

 

Friday we covered Delpit’s “The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse” and Smitherman’s “‘God Don’t Never Change’: Black English from a Black Perspective.” This discussion was one of the best I’ve had with my class in some time. I was surprised, because I confessed to them I did not have a particularly “fun” or “engaging” way in to the material, but they were fairly forthcoming with their conversation on what some could perceive to be a difficult or uncomfortable topic. I stressed the conversation Delpit has with Gee in her article, and they seemed to enjoy seeing firsthand an author finally explicitly and thoroughly demonstrate this concept that I have emphasized from the second day of class.

 

I made a point of asking the students to quote more to me from the text, and I found this to be a really useful impetus for discussion and comprehension of the article. I have steadily increased my insistence on students’ reference to their textbooks in class, and I am finally seeing the benefits manifest themselves. I am absolutely going to continue to have my students get their textbooks out at the beginning of class and ask them questions which force them to look through the text during class time for quotes that answer my questions or support the claims they make about the text.

 

More so than with the other texts about marginalized groups, my students were able to see how this article related to writing in general, to them as a non-marginalized group, and to their own writing. I finally saw them discussing composition pedagogies in relation to this article, the other articles we’ve read, and their own experiences in the writing classroom. I can’t definitively explain this new enlightenment; I didn’t really do anything differently with this piece than with the others. Overall, I have tried to recycle more of the key terms from past articles into our present discussion of a text, as well as solicit more examples of how our current article relates to the others we’ve read (and offer my own,) pushing them to address the academic conversation we are covering as a whole. 

 

Overall this week reminded me that I need to stay on my toes, be flexible with my lesson plans, and to mix things up with my students once in a while. Always relying on group work can hurt as much as it can help, and to me there is nothing more satisfying that conducting a successful whole class discussion.

Teaching Journal #11

For Monday, we read Heilker and Yergeau’s “Autism and Rhetoric” in Readings on Writing as well as the Chapter 5 Introduction in Writing About Writing. Not having assigned homework on the Chapter 5 Introduction, I correctly suspected that many of my students did not read it closely, or even at all. To combat this, I read the rather short introduction aloud to the class and discussed what we would be covering in this next unit and what they should take from the readings. I think this was important to do, because if students don’t read the introductions to the various chapters in WAW as I assign them, they could have questions about how the readings are important for the class, why they have to read them, or how the readings relate to them and their writing.

 

Monday’s lesson plan was pretty straightforward. My students were able, through group analysis of the “Peter Speaks” and “Melanie Speaks” sections, to grasp the construct that autistic behaviors can be read as rhetorical tools of that specific language or discourse community.

 

In the interest of keeping students on task for Project 3, I have been dedicating about 5-10 minutes at the end of each class to ask students about their projects. I find this to hold students a little more responsible for the process work of the paper, and helps to keep them on track. For Monday, I went around the room and asked each student to share with the class what primary research they conducted over the weekend.

 

Wednesday’s class posed an interesting teaching challenge as we covered Victor Villanueva’s “Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color” in Readings on Writing. From the beginning of the class, my students expressed a great deal of confusion about what Villanueva was even arguing. When I questioned why they found the article so difficult, they said that he used so much of the work of other authors, they easily lost sight of Villanueva’s own words. I ended up having to start the class by lecturing on Villanueva’s argument for the importance of memory in writing, specifically for writers of color. I pointed out relevant passages in Villanueva’s own words to help my students understand.

 

I then tried to illustrate for my students how Villanueva used various genres of writing from other scholars to illustrate his points. They accepted my argument, but maintained their stance that Villanueva did not rely enough on his own material in this article. This led to a very interesting discussion of academic writing as a genre, an analysis of the style of other articles we’ve read, and a throwback discussion of writing conventions.

 

Friday was a workshop day. I scheduled us in a computer classroom so everyone could follow along with the “Athens Music Community” paper I posted on BlackBoard. I had assigned the students to read the essay beforehand, but I figured if they had the paper in front of them even those who negelected to read it could follow along and make some sort of contribution to the discussion. I made a deal with my students beforehand, that, as long as they all agreed to participate in class discussion (and even—gasp—expect to be called on) I would not assign them any written homework to turn in on Friday. A good deal of my students participated, but I did not hesitate to call on those who did not. As a result, I had to put on my stern teacher hat for a moment and call out a couple of students who were visible disengaged (not following along with where we were in the paper, chair pushed away from the computer, etc.) I haven’t really had much trouble with authority in the classroom thus far, but I am a little worried these last few weeks might be a trial. I am going to continue to hold students accountable for homework and class discussion without adopting an accusatory tone. I usually play it off with a joke, which seems to cut down on potential hostility between the students and me.

Teaching Journal #10

In starting off Monday’s class, I asked each student to share what discourse community they would like to research. In this way I was able to address any problems I could foresee arising in a quick and efficient manner.

 

We also read and discussed Devitt et. al.’s “Materiality and Genre in Discourse Communities.” This essay did a good job of making students more familiar with the terms “genre” and “ethnography,” which the understanding and performance of will be vital for them to succeed in project three.

 

As a group activity, I split the class into three groups and had each group tackle a different essay, summarizing the main points of the article, identifying the genres discussed, and identifying how each mini-article fits into the larger article as a whole. Group work always seems to work fairly well with my class in terms of getting my students to discuss the readings. Whenever we do whole class discussion, the conversation is essentially limited to me and around five students; however, when we start off with group discussion, everyone seems to be comfortable participating on the smaller scale, and I am able to go around to each group and talk to some students who I would not normally have the opportunity to engage in discussion. I think perhaps their comfort with conversation among each other stems from the fact that they know each other well from being members of the same learning community.

 

Wednesday we discussed Malinowitz’s “Queer Texts, Queer Contexts.” I started out the class by asking the student to do a freewrite answering the question “what value does this article hold for non-LGBT community members?” I was hoping the answers would foster discussion on how we can talk about how this article’s concepts of discourse communities and identity can be applied to all writers within the composition classroom. What resulted was more of a discussion on the importance of everyone being exposed to LGBT issues. While I think this was a useful discussion on why we should all be exposed to these issued, I found myself having trouble getting the students to focus on how the article applied to composition. I had my students answer questions from the apparatus in groups, and this helped point the conversation more in the direction of the implications of Malinowitz’s definitions of identity and discourse community for the composition classroom. I’ll have to work harder next week in our session on Heilker and Yergeau to define the line between the activism in a piece and the rhetoric in a piece—which is actually applicable to our class.

 

For our workshop day on Friday, I basically copied the activity we did in 5890. I printed off 5 student essays and gave them to certain assigned groups (making sure no one had to review their own paper.) I then asked them to read the essay as a group an answer a group of questions similar to those we answered in our own workshop in 5890. This worked relatively well. I was hoping they would get more out of this workshop than they had with other workshops we’ve done in the past where I read the paper aloud. This way, at least, every student was forced to read another student paper and engage (at least a the group level) with some aspect of peer review.

 

I found myself having to be rather stern for the first time in my classroom when a student brought up grades (always a hot topic in any classroom.) This quickly escalated into a whole class discussion about the grading contract. Now, in addition to explaining the grading contract in depth on the first day, I have talked about the grading contract in class more than once throughout the semester. I was therefore a little surprised when some students expressed surprise at the fact that their absences counted as minor violations. I explained yet again what constituted a minor violation and that three minor violations equaled a drop in their grades by one letter.