In my doc. seminar, we had been discussing Moffett's essay called "Inner Speech." We had discussed how sometimes people have a weird reaction to the idea of meditation in the classroom. I accidentally came across the blog. I had not heard the story on NPR. Here is his blog. http://tackingtowardtranscendence.blogspot.com/2005/10/misguided-angels.html
I tried a writing exercise in Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writer's. After reading Moffett's piece, I would say that it is meditation. What a great way to tap into your inner speech. A few minutes of quiet before writing can make a huge difference in our writing.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Monday, October 24, 2005
Thoughts from class today
I'm playing devil's advocate here. Today in my rhetoric of emotions class we discussed our final paper that we have to write. I'm totally on board with it and ready to write, but something about the conversation made me question it. This is a class on Rhetoric of Emotion, Affect, and Motives. The final paper is an argumentative or persuasive paper. Donna showed us an abstract that she had written--which was awesome. She's been the first professor I've had to really talk about what to do. The proposal was excellent, slightly formal, although she used the first person. After reading the abstract, I wanted to read more. But the point is that isn't an argumentative or persuasive paper directly from the institutional and patriarchal handbook? We're using the framework condoned and supported by the institution--we're not hacking at all. The class is about rhetoric, emotion, affect, and motive and we will write in the cool, rational logic of argumentation.
Is there emotion in rhetorical modes? Don't you have to write differently when we are aware of emotion and affect? Our understandings of academic writing are socially constructed, so until we write an argumentative paper we will not have learned anything.
Today Maggie mentioned the fact that students feel shame in school. And I just wanted to say that is true for teachers as well. Pedagogical change or just changes in thinking for students can feel very threatening. I recently heard a teacher say she didn't want to try to have students write and read more (by choosing their own books) because they'll cheat, and anyway "I like the way my classroom is. It works for me." I guess the reason I mentioned this is that her reply was filled with anger. I'm wondering if her intellect is threatened. For her, it is more important to have kids one the same page, keeping on the same topic. I believe it is easier to control emotions when everyone is reading the same thing (and I think that many teachers feel like emotions are universal, so students will be thinking the same ideas about the novel. How many teachers ask the students to discover the "themes" of the novel for themselves?)
Is pedagogy arbitrary? Really? It's highly influenced by motives and control. Russell brought up Bertrand Russell's school. It didn't seem to work too well. If you want to have a class run itself, it's important that students listen to each other. Is it controlling if I explain to them different ways that they can listen and then respond? I don't think so. Okay, I'm rambling now.
I'M SORRY. :)
Is there emotion in rhetorical modes? Don't you have to write differently when we are aware of emotion and affect? Our understandings of academic writing are socially constructed, so until we write an argumentative paper we will not have learned anything.
Today Maggie mentioned the fact that students feel shame in school. And I just wanted to say that is true for teachers as well. Pedagogical change or just changes in thinking for students can feel very threatening. I recently heard a teacher say she didn't want to try to have students write and read more (by choosing their own books) because they'll cheat, and anyway "I like the way my classroom is. It works for me." I guess the reason I mentioned this is that her reply was filled with anger. I'm wondering if her intellect is threatened. For her, it is more important to have kids one the same page, keeping on the same topic. I believe it is easier to control emotions when everyone is reading the same thing (and I think that many teachers feel like emotions are universal, so students will be thinking the same ideas about the novel. How many teachers ask the students to discover the "themes" of the novel for themselves?)
Is pedagogy arbitrary? Really? It's highly influenced by motives and control. Russell brought up Bertrand Russell's school. It didn't seem to work too well. If you want to have a class run itself, it's important that students listen to each other. Is it controlling if I explain to them different ways that they can listen and then respond? I don't think so. Okay, I'm rambling now.
I'M SORRY. :)
What every writing teacher should know
I'm reading A Short History of Writing Instruction. This post concerns mainly Halloran's section. I took history of writing and structure of the English language before, but I don't know if we ever discussed this.
1) Writing tools affect how we compose. Halloran explains that "old-style writing tools necessitated a two stage composing process" (p. 170). The writer invented and did all of his thinking in his head before he attempted to write down the words. He needed to get the words right the first time. It's interesting that our thinking hasn't changed much, although their thinking was a necessity. Even now with computer technology and good pencils, students follow this two stage process. Haven't you heard people say, "Oh, I do all of my writing in my head."
2) The teaching of writing was subordinate to the teaching of speech, or oracy. Writing had to be understand by readers rather than listeners (p. 173), so physical elements of writing had to be introduced to mirror this oratorical elements--thus, we have sentences, paragraphs, outlines, and structures in general. And don't forget diagramming sentences, folks brought to us in 1875 by Reed and Kellogg in Graded Lessons in English. I was totally on Halloran's team in this article. He mentions that this book was published through the 20s and used for decades afterward--even today. "[T]he Reed and Kellogg system failed to preserve the natural order of words in the sentence, but it nonetheless represented an advance in the effort to understand the structure of discourse at the sentence level, and an important response to the shift from an oratorical to a literary and professional culture" (p. 173). I don't understand that last part.
Kellogg had another book that did not include sentence diagramming, which was too elementary for upper high school and college, and Halloran explains that this book has sentence-combining exercises. Hmmm. I like that idea. But isn't it funny that the sentence diagramming is what has stayed in our consciousness.
Child, a Harvard professor, believed that composition needed to focus on literary study. He disliked rhetoric. And English studies became Harvardized. "The discipline of English became primarily the study of literary texts, not in Stewart's catholic sense of 'includ[ing] everything from a seventh grader's paragraph on fishing, to a graduate student's term paper on Chaucer's Pardoner, to Moby Dick, but int he narrow sense of classics understood to be fundamentally different from anything the student might write" (p. 176). This pushed rhetoric to the side, and writing becomes a way to test reading and conventions become more important than composing.
1) Writing tools affect how we compose. Halloran explains that "old-style writing tools necessitated a two stage composing process" (p. 170). The writer invented and did all of his thinking in his head before he attempted to write down the words. He needed to get the words right the first time. It's interesting that our thinking hasn't changed much, although their thinking was a necessity. Even now with computer technology and good pencils, students follow this two stage process. Haven't you heard people say, "Oh, I do all of my writing in my head."
2) The teaching of writing was subordinate to the teaching of speech, or oracy. Writing had to be understand by readers rather than listeners (p. 173), so physical elements of writing had to be introduced to mirror this oratorical elements--thus, we have sentences, paragraphs, outlines, and structures in general. And don't forget diagramming sentences, folks brought to us in 1875 by Reed and Kellogg in Graded Lessons in English. I was totally on Halloran's team in this article. He mentions that this book was published through the 20s and used for decades afterward--even today. "[T]he Reed and Kellogg system failed to preserve the natural order of words in the sentence, but it nonetheless represented an advance in the effort to understand the structure of discourse at the sentence level, and an important response to the shift from an oratorical to a literary and professional culture" (p. 173). I don't understand that last part.
Kellogg had another book that did not include sentence diagramming, which was too elementary for upper high school and college, and Halloran explains that this book has sentence-combining exercises. Hmmm. I like that idea. But isn't it funny that the sentence diagramming is what has stayed in our consciousness.
Child, a Harvard professor, believed that composition needed to focus on literary study. He disliked rhetoric. And English studies became Harvardized. "The discipline of English became primarily the study of literary texts, not in Stewart's catholic sense of 'includ[ing] everything from a seventh grader's paragraph on fishing, to a graduate student's term paper on Chaucer's Pardoner, to Moby Dick, but int he narrow sense of classics understood to be fundamentally different from anything the student might write" (p. 176). This pushed rhetoric to the side, and writing becomes a way to test reading and conventions become more important than composing.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Long Time, No Blog
We're reading Feeling Power by Megan Boler in Donna's class. I like this book. It seems related to my thinking on reader response theory and emotions and education. I mentioned this in class the other day. In education, we don't talk about the sexual/affective/gendered issues that occur in schools. As I was reading Boler books, I was thinking that I want to teach a class called Gender and Emotion in Education, or Teaching, something like that. I noticed pretty quickly that if you are a female teacher who does not follow the typical nurturing and caring identity for a female teacher the students will come down hard in the beginning. I don't know how to explain that more.
I was writing notes on every page of this book and thinking of so many stories. I was going to write, "I know I have the tendency to ramble..." That's sort of an apology. Why do I feel the need to apologize for my work? She said that women feel the need to apologize or feel ashamed when they turn work in. They don't believe that their work is inferior, but they do feel their work in inferior. I could relate to that. I feel that way all of the time; I also felt that was a personal problem of my own. It's interesting to read that may be prevalent, that it may be socially constructed somehow.
Boler talked about social uptake on page 14. A woman does something successfully and points it out to a man; he disagrees, calls her a crazy bitch, and then ignores her--thus, silencing her. I think this social uptake occurs in the classroom. The teacher doesn't call the students crazy bitches, but this is how I see it happening:
A student brings up a good point or asks a good question that is not found in the teacher's edition of the textbook. The teacher says, "Your on the wrong page" or "That's not what the author is saying" or "You don't seem to understand" or "Your not a good reader." He or she then calls on the next person or continues to lecture. Really it is just an assertion of authority.
On page 4, she said that one of the few "spaces of power available" is resistance. I think this is especially true if you teach in a more tradition, maybe less relevant way.
I know I'm just trailing off here (ah, another apology), but I would love to hear any comments out in the blogosphere.
I was writing notes on every page of this book and thinking of so many stories. I was going to write, "I know I have the tendency to ramble..." That's sort of an apology. Why do I feel the need to apologize for my work? She said that women feel the need to apologize or feel ashamed when they turn work in. They don't believe that their work is inferior, but they do feel their work in inferior. I could relate to that. I feel that way all of the time; I also felt that was a personal problem of my own. It's interesting to read that may be prevalent, that it may be socially constructed somehow.
Boler talked about social uptake on page 14. A woman does something successfully and points it out to a man; he disagrees, calls her a crazy bitch, and then ignores her--thus, silencing her. I think this social uptake occurs in the classroom. The teacher doesn't call the students crazy bitches, but this is how I see it happening:
A student brings up a good point or asks a good question that is not found in the teacher's edition of the textbook. The teacher says, "Your on the wrong page" or "That's not what the author is saying" or "You don't seem to understand" or "Your not a good reader." He or she then calls on the next person or continues to lecture. Really it is just an assertion of authority.
On page 4, she said that one of the few "spaces of power available" is resistance. I think this is especially true if you teach in a more tradition, maybe less relevant way.
I know I'm just trailing off here (ah, another apology), but I would love to hear any comments out in the blogosphere.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
An affective paper
It seems like as I read articles in Donna's class that I keep seeing glimmers of reader response theory. The class is the Rhetoric of Emotion, Affect, and Motives. It seems that our readings are leading us to think more about affect, and I guess I took that to mean "where is it?" And, if it's not there, "why not?"
Emotion isn't a valued thing in our society. I sat at a speech tournament and heard a very intelligent young woman say that a woman shouldn't be president because she would be too emotional. So we equate emotion with being irrational or illogical.
So let me try to connec this to rhetoric. For Aristotle, emotion was a tool to persuade. But if you are using it as a tool, you really have to have control of it, you have to be able to balance the emotion. Can't have too much or too little. A good example might be Howard Dean. He had too much and the nation, generally, came down on him for that.
I want to make a connection between emotion and reading. I will generalize here and say that many high school English teachers prescribe to a New Critic stance when approaching literature. There understanding would be that there is one interpretation to a text. This interpretation from the teacher is assessed by a multiple choice test or by a literary analysis paper or a compare-contrast--some paper steeped in rhetorical tradition. These lit. analysis papers, at least when I was in college and I think this is still true, need to be in the third person. You might take a literary element and analyze that through the text. You need to appear objective although you are arguing for an interpretation (more like supporting an interpretation already outlined by the teacher).
Showing emotion in a lit. analysis paper is not a good thing. Good papers are detached, rationale, logical, and organized in a linear fashion.
My suggestion is that reader response theory isn't in classrooms or is misunderstood because it does value an aesthetic or affective response. Although Rosenblatt outlined a continuum with aesthetic on one end and efferent on the other. She didn't really say, I don't think, that one was better than the other, but that both needed to be used in the classroom. But the only approach that we see a majority of the time is the efferent response--that without emotion.
Emotion is seen as silly. For instance, reader response theory may be summarized by those who don't know much about as asking students a questions like this, "How do you feel about the text?" Or they think that reader response means that any answer is okay, no one is wrong.
Is it that our dominant cultural value of being logical and unemotional is so strong that we see sharing emotion or personal connection as a mistake?
I have some more ideas about this paper, but I would love to hear any comments.
Emotion isn't a valued thing in our society. I sat at a speech tournament and heard a very intelligent young woman say that a woman shouldn't be president because she would be too emotional. So we equate emotion with being irrational or illogical.
So let me try to connec this to rhetoric. For Aristotle, emotion was a tool to persuade. But if you are using it as a tool, you really have to have control of it, you have to be able to balance the emotion. Can't have too much or too little. A good example might be Howard Dean. He had too much and the nation, generally, came down on him for that.
I want to make a connection between emotion and reading. I will generalize here and say that many high school English teachers prescribe to a New Critic stance when approaching literature. There understanding would be that there is one interpretation to a text. This interpretation from the teacher is assessed by a multiple choice test or by a literary analysis paper or a compare-contrast--some paper steeped in rhetorical tradition. These lit. analysis papers, at least when I was in college and I think this is still true, need to be in the third person. You might take a literary element and analyze that through the text. You need to appear objective although you are arguing for an interpretation (more like supporting an interpretation already outlined by the teacher).
Showing emotion in a lit. analysis paper is not a good thing. Good papers are detached, rationale, logical, and organized in a linear fashion.
My suggestion is that reader response theory isn't in classrooms or is misunderstood because it does value an aesthetic or affective response. Although Rosenblatt outlined a continuum with aesthetic on one end and efferent on the other. She didn't really say, I don't think, that one was better than the other, but that both needed to be used in the classroom. But the only approach that we see a majority of the time is the efferent response--that without emotion.
Emotion is seen as silly. For instance, reader response theory may be summarized by those who don't know much about as asking students a questions like this, "How do you feel about the text?" Or they think that reader response means that any answer is okay, no one is wrong.
Is it that our dominant cultural value of being logical and unemotional is so strong that we see sharing emotion or personal connection as a mistake?
I have some more ideas about this paper, but I would love to hear any comments.
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