That Quiet Kid

It happens every semester.

There is one student (in my mind, usually male) who never talks. Sometimes he's in the back, sometimes he's in the front, but he just sits there and stares (sometimes under the brim of a baseball hat).

Then, inevitably, this kid writes a brilliant paper. And everything you said on the first day of class about the importance of participation, about how you have to talk to learn, about how we're all in this together and you have to contribute to learn right along with everyone else, etc. doesn't make sense. Because this kid said like one or two things the entire class thus far and yet seemed to get it more than anyone else.

I was always baffled about why this happened, up until this last week reading Living Speech by James Boyd White. White argues that much of what we say is "dead" speech -- cliches, empty phrases, chatter, propoganda -- it lacks meaning and life. He discusses briefly Quaker church services and Trappist monks, both of which are marked by silence. In a Quaker church service, everyone sits in silence until someone feels as though he or she has something meaningful to say. Similarly, the monks take a vow of silence not to alienate others but to clear away the clutter of daily life, to perhaps hear God better. (Though perhaps not as erudite of an example, there's an episode of Buffy where everyone loses their voice -- a similar point is made about how little of what we say actually means anything.) I mentioned this (the silent student, not the Buffy ep) to my professor, who remarked that studies of gifted children show that they spend a good portion of their day staring out the window.

I believe in silence in the classroom. After I ask a question, I usually let the silence stretch for quite some time -- silence gives students time to think. Sometimes you can't just answer a question right off the bat. Sometimes you need to look at your notes, or the reading, or the book, or sometimes you just need to stare out the window.

Notes on Literacy

For my first unit in my composition course, I’ve decided to have students analyze and write their own literacy narratives. We’re spending the first week of class or so figuring out what a “literacy narrative” is, so I thought I might post some ideas here while I think it through for myself.

Questions
1. What does it mean to be literate? I just read David Russell’s introduction to Writing in the Academic Disciplines, and he writes, “”Literacy is thus a function of the specific community in which certain kinds of reading and writing activities take place … As Brazilian sociolinguist Terezina Carrahar notes, a professor may, without irony, express pleasure that her maid is ‘literate’ because she can barely decode recipes and take down phone messages, but complain that her students are ‘illiterate’ because they do not yet understand the conventions of written discourse in her discipline” (13). (We’re gonna go ahead and breeze through the idea that a professor could ever make enough money to hire a maid to take phone messages, and while we’re at it, we’ll forget about the complicated ethics of such a decision.)
2. How do different people/groups define literacy? What is the link between literacy and community?
3. What different kinds of literacies are there? Whenever I am around new people (as I have been recently), I often try to evaluate their pop-culture literacy, because pop culture is important to me and because I make a lot of pop culture references. In fact, even in writing this blog I’ve thought about how literate my readership is with respect to the various references I’m making. In this way, I’m sort of defining literacy as “knowing stuff about stuff” but more specifically in reference to people who read entertainment news, watch TV and movies, etc.
4. Who is our “best” audience for our writing? People who are literate in the same way we are? One of my pet peeves is people who randomly quote movie or TV show lines and then just stare at you as thought you’re supposed to know what they’re talking about. One of my favorite things though, is when people make those references and I get them. It’s like we’re sharing a literacy! So part of knowing your audience is knowing their literacy.
5. What literacies do I have? (Note: Word put a squiggly red line under “literacies”)
6. A literacy narrative is basically a story about language, speech, reading, or writing and learning. How does the style of the narrative reflect the literacy being explained?
7. Are most literacy narratives stories of failure or success?
8. How do we measure literacy?
9. Are some literacies valued more than others?

My next writing class

I like to use writing to figure out the way I feel about something. I think the reason that college students sometimes write crappy research papers is that they weren’t genuinely curious. The way a research paper should work is that there is an urgent need to figure out something you don’t know. You begin with a question, separating what you do know from what you want to/need to know. Then, using the tools at your disposal, you find the information you seek, and place it into a form that’s most appropriate for your audience.

I don’t think it’s entirely possible in the first-year writing class to create a genuine research situation. Due to the nature of school and grading, it’s always going to be kind of faux. But I believe we can create research paper topics that genuinely interest students. But what would interest a random group of 20-year-olds? What confuses them? What do they want to know more about but do not yet have sufficient information?

Relationships. It seems to me that at the beginning of college students are leaving the high school mode of transient relationships. They’re less hormonal. They ‘re even beginning to think about the future, long-term relationships, even marriage. Though they’re processing all these possibilities, they don’t have it quite figured out yet. This is the perfect occasion for a research question. (Plus, I’m confused about relationships too, so we can all learn together. William Perry shows that students move to higher levels of intellectual development when the teacher is seen as “in the same boat”)

I’m thinking the class could even follow an arc of a relationship.
1. How do you find/create a relationship? How to pick up people, where to meet people. This could also include discussions of phenomena like online dating (rhetorical analysis of a match.com profile?), and of course, the awkwardness of first dates, dating etiquette. (Possible texts: online dating profiles, The Game, that scene from Magnolia where Tom Cruise plays the pickup artist, books that tell you how to pick up women/men, how to find a husband/wife )
2. How do you nurture a relationship? Transitioning from someone you’re “dating” to someone you’re “with” – In fact, think of how much terminology and wordplay factor into this phase. The first time your partner refers to the two of you as “us,” the first “I love you.” (Possible texts: Sex and the City, those self-help books that talk about how to get your boyfriend to propose to you)
3. How do you end a relationship? This is, of course, all a matter of words. How do you break up with someone? What do you say? (Possible texts: He’s Just Not That Into You/It’s Called A Breakup Because It’s Broken, that episode of Seinfeld about “It’s not you, it’s me” – in fact, any number of Seinfeld episodes would work, we could also analyze breakup songs)
4. How do you maintain a relationship? Marriage would be a topic here, obviously, and gay marriage and civil unions (I would have to make sure the class wasn’t too focused on the heterosexual). It might even be neat at this point to have students interview someone whose relationship they admire and ask for advice. (Possible texts: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus)

I’ve been looking up relationship books on Amazon, and they all have comic names like Why Men Love Bitches, and I Used to Miss Him But My Aim is Improving.

Does anyone have any suggestions for other texts I could use?

Why I'll Miss You

I have written in this blog previously that I wanted to be little parts of different things; specifically, I wanted to glob together a bunch of religions and make them all my religion. I have since come to consider this further and maybe I think the integrity of each religion is a good thing. In fact, maybe I think each religion should just fully strive to be what it is, instead of making concessions to other religions and therefore diluting itself.

But I have decided that when you leave people (as I will be doing in just under two weeks), you can keep little parts of them. You can keep the story they told you and tell it as an anecdote at a party when you’re getting to know someone else. You can remember the way they handled themselves in a tough situation, and when faced with one yourself, you can draw on what you saw them do. You can treat people the way they treated them. You can remember one of their clever observations and use it to view the world. You can adopt their sense of humor, their taste in movies, their delights in simple things. You can tell stories with the certain inflection they always used. In a class this last semester, we talked about the plagiarism hysteria currently sweeping the country, and leading to phenomenon like turnitin.com, which victimizes students and polices the outcomes of plagiarisms without examining its underlying causes. But I think that when you’ve really gotten to know someone, really spent time with them, you plagiarize them. Little bits of them become all of you, and in this way, it’s like they never left.

So this is why, if you’re a person I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you because I won’t be able to cheat off you anymore; because there won’t be any more stories or movies or observations to challenge me and shape me. I’m recording here some things I’m going to plagiarize from some of my good friends who won’t be in Arizona. In short, these are things that I admire about you, and I hope that in some small way I have learned from you.

Kristin: The way you feel comfortable in any group or setting, how you laugh
JR: Your ability to make people feel comfortable, to tell a good story (usually with impressions and hand gestures)
Jennifer: Your serenity, how it seems like nothing ever fazes you
Catherine: Your ability to accept things as they come (Daoism, I think it’s called)
Emily: How you embrace, unapologetically, your “dorkiness”
Dustin: Your humility and graciousness
Elizabeth: How you always rave about others, your loyalty
Angela: Your friendliness (and neighborliness)
Aaron: Your ability to BS
Reify: How you adapt to any situation (including hordes of English graduate students)
Juliette: How you always have a smile for everyone, no matter what their story

And the list goes on! I was just going through my Facebook friends list to create this, and I only included people who I thought wouldn't mind making an appearance here. In fact, it reminds me of my favorite goodbye line, from The Last Battle, the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Why I’m Now Titling My Posts Like This

Recently, I’ve been compulsively reading Slate.com, a compendium of news and opinion pieces mostly about contemporary culture. I find that when I’m presented with a page from Slate, I am compelled to click on at least four or five articles and end up not only finding out something new but something that I didn’t even know I was interested in. Why? Because their titles are question-posing, typically using words like How and Why. For example:

“Why There Are So Many Movies About Rats”
“Why Does Starbucks Sell Music So Well?”
“How John McCain’s Struggling Campaign Could Recover”

From Slate, we learn the importance not of thorough research, not of creating an all-encompassing outline, not in careful revision, but the absolute necessity of creating a good and interesting question. This is not only important for producing the impetus to write, but for our readers to be engaged. So I’m going to try to use such titles more from now on.

ALSO (randomly)

How excited am I about this book?

And I will be posting a list of my simple things. I’m just coagulating them all for one post.

Dissertation Idea

Okay, so it’s a little early to think about a dissertation (hello, Faith In Five Years!) but I’ve been inspired by a book I just read: Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year. Nathan – a pseudonym – was a professor or anthropology at a large state university, and felt that she was disconnected from her students. They fell asleep in class, didn’t do the reading, and basically didn’t seem to care much about school. So she decided to investigate undergraduate culture from their point of view – she moved into a dorm and enrolled for a full freshman courseload.

I greatly admire Nathan’s ambition. In fact, this is something I can say for anthropological ethnographers that I can’t say for composition ethnographers – they put themselves out there. They take risks. I would love to do a project like this, except instead of aiming to discover all of undergraduate culture, I would be more interested in learning about how the freshman experience relates to student writing. How does the freshman composition course compare to the other courses the students are taking? How does the intellectual activity of writing fit in with their other activities? Where does comp fall in their list of priorities? Nathan took five classes with five professors and three teaching assistants, which meaning that in one semester there were eight people making rules and structuring her day. It’s little wonder that students feel overwhelmed trying to meet so many different expectations. Since writing is always “for an audience” I wonder how these different demands influence students’ writing as well.
Nathan discusses some interesting ethical issues she faced: with very few exceptions, she didn’t reveal her true identity. She even paid for the whole thing herself so she wouldn’t have to turn over her notes to anyone. I think I would have an advantage over also be able to pass for a freshman, whereas Nathan was in her fifties. I wonder, however, if I’m not distanced enough from the culture to see it objectively.

Some of Nathan’s insights:

Students are working more than they ever have (or have had to) in the past, and their jobs not only take up a large part of their time but also play a large role in their social lives. A student once told me that she kept missing my class because she had to work late and this made her either (1) tired or (2) sick. And she had to work forty hours a week to pay for school. Though I sympathized, I wondered why she was working so hard to pay for classes she didn’t go to.

Nathan believes that the lack of “community” on typical college campuses (e.g. poorly attended hall events) stems from the overabundance of competing options as to how students can spend their time. She explains “it is hard to create a community when the sheer number of options in college life generate a system in which no one is in the same place at the same time” (38. Students can choose where to live, their major, their extracurriculars, their classes, where to eat, what to do with their free time, where to study, etc. This has gotten to the point where just because you go to the same school as someone doesn’t mean you have anything in common. She writes, “Seen from the level of the institution, ‘community’ is a lofty ideal but with few common activities, rituals, or even symbols to bind together its diverse inhabitants” (40).

Besides work friends, students also seem to form networks based on “shared circumstances and shared demographics” rather than “personality” (57). I thought this happened just at UW because classes were so large, but she reports that in her research “classroom contacts figured relatively little into the social networks of students” (57). In fact, “the most significant relationships are formed either before college or either very early on in one’s college career, most often in some shared affiliation, whether voluntary or not, such as freshman dorm assignment, special freshman summer program, ROTC, ethnic club, or sorority and fraternity rush” (58).

She has some great ideas about why students are hesitant to speak in class. “Equality” is an unconscious norm of the classroom, meaning that students strive not to be “too noticeable . . . It is fine to do well in a class, performing better than others, but only if you do it unobtrusively” (91). She links this to campus activism that doesn’t engage in dialogue with anyone, despite its attempt to be “in your face.” I was thinking of Bascom Hill at UW-Madison, which was variously littered with signs, crosses, pink flamingoes, all in the vague name of “awareness-raising.” Nathan calls these “assertion without direct dialogue, an ‘in your face’ argument without a real face at the other end” (96).

Nathan also points to the depressing reality that “academic life is tangential or at odds with peer culture,” which as been a finding of many studies of campus culture. When she wandered the halls of the dorm, students were talking about sex or boys or drinking. Aside from meetings, like those for group projects, “none of the talk . . . concerned either the substantive content of a class or any other topic that might be labeled academic or intellectual” (99). This also offers an explanation for why students don’t seem to think it’s a big deal to miss class or not do their work. If academic isn’t the number one priority in their lives, it makes sense to them that going home for Easter or being sick or drinking with their friends is a good reason skip school. She said that one of her most sobering insights was that intellectual life just didn’t matter that much in college.

Ultimately, Nathan argues that college needs to be a site of “liminality” or a rite of passage for students. In order to do so, it must resist the world, which is becoming more market-driven (hence the multitude of options for students. She says, “we would not want a university to become so immersed in the world that it can neither critique that world nor proffer an ideal vision of how else it might be” (153).