ENGL 505A

Here's the way my proposed reading list shook out.

Lou

After playing a competitive round of Find It!, we moved on and into a discussion of search engines (which ones to use for what - Google, Google Scholar, Academic Search Premier, JStor, the library book catalog, etc...) how to find full text articles, and how to evaluate credibility in journals, books, web sources, and find an appropriate fit. We took actual prompts from the game - actual "requests" from the patrons - and in groups came up with sources found through a variety of the engines and then discussed their level of utility.

And by that, I don't mean their names. I mean what's in the name of the class that we teach and what difference does it make. Do we teach Composition, Composition and Rhetoric, Rhetoric, Grammar, Linguistics, Writing.... and so on. When I read Connors, I couldn't help but agree that somehow it does feel as though we've lost sight of the basic units of writing like the sentence and have been theoretically privileging attitudes (as he calls them) that trickle down from the English dept.

The heart of the Sommers article "responding to student writing" was, for me, her statement that "teachers' comments can take attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attentuion on the teachers' purpose in commenting." My reaction to her statement is two fold, partially in agreement with her basic theoretical premise here, but also, in disagreement with the unstated assumption that lurks behind this statement.

"Successful rhetoricians are to some extent like poets, born, not made. They are also dependent on years of practice and experience. And we can finally admit that even the firmest of principle about writing cannot be taught in the same sense that elementary logic or arithmetic or French can be taught."

Ha! See rant on Rose. Attach comment here as evidence of my point.

I kept going back to the Mike Rose article after class Thursday, and every time I did, I got more and more pissed off. It wasn't that he was saying anything that was all that disagreeable, its more that he's really a piss poor academic.

Look at his argument for a minute, and I mean really look at it rhetorically and you'll see what I mean. You can boil his argument down to this (and if his paper was a student's paper, this is what I'd do)

1. Blocked writers get blocked because of rules.
2. Good writers don't get blocked because of rules.

I usually hate throwing around my opinion (ok, so that's a lie but i usually at least admit that my opinion is probably pretty cheap to come by) but after three days of one-on-one conferencing, I just want to relay an anecdote or two that I think speaks to both the utility and the humanity of giving our students some individual lovin', and by lovin' i mean conferencing (as I wrote that I felt some people (this means you Sam) possibly growing a little tense).

Well it came and went, and really, for the most part, was unremarkable. Thankfully. (With the exception that I was wet - soaked actually - but had luckily brought a change of clothes). I did have one poor student sit all the way through class, come up afterwards and say, "Hey I wasn't on your roster when you called roll." So I looked at his schedule and he was in the wrong room for the wrong day... Ha!

I've read a lot of Newkirk and other New Hampshire-ites, and other conference heavy compositionists like Lad Tobin, and, in theory, I don't think I could possibly agree with their ideas and approach more. Writing, as an expression of self (even if that self is performative in nature, which I believe that it is) is necessarily a personal act, and, for these students, this will indeed be the first experience of direct and intimate contact with a Professor and, possibly, their other students.

Hey all, I think sharing stories helps develop a community between us as fellow tas as well as provides some entertainment, a place to vent, and a chance to develop and further understanding within the classroom. That sounds kinda serious... Anywho, if ya've got an anecdote ya'd like to share or even a passing stray thought, stick it here.

See ya'll in the trenches.

Lou