What To Do With Opportunity

Yesterday, we discussed pointing out mistakes as opportunities. “Failure is the mother of success” and all that (thank you, JuanJuan). I have to say it—this reminds me again of Macrorie. Particularly, it reminds me of the point he made regarding the existence of various truths and the inability to know THE ultimate truth (see my last blog entry). The phenomenon of “comma splice” is in one sense an error. In the context of learning, however, that is not a helpful way to think about it. An equally truthful and more productive characterization of “comma splice” is as opportunity. Calling comma splices “opportunities” is not a clever way of talking around the issue. Both ways of thinking are true, though each way has its own appropriate modus operandi because each way only reflects part of the truth.

Now I want to move on from the facets of truth that opportunity and error represent and talk a little about what we should do with those opportunities/errors when we find them in student papers. Dr. Kemp mentioned the idea that criticism needs to be accompanied by a program of remediation in order for it to work. As he wrote in our notes: “The reliance on error in teacher feedback is a function of how easy it is to find and tag error and how difficult it is to discover, explain, and remediate rhetorical dysfunction.” Ok. That sounds plausible. It also sounds like it goes along with Shaughnessy’s idea that a teacher of BW students “might well begin by trying to understand the logic of their mistakes in order to determine at what point or points along the developmental path error should or can become a subject for instruction” (395). But if you do that, don’t you need to know the student in at least a minimally personal sense? How can you track a specific pattern of errors (excuse me, opportunities) in a student’s work if you don’t know that you are grading that particular student’s work from one assignment to the next?

Shaughnessy says that there is little that is “random or illogical” in BW student writing. What we may perceive as “chaos of error” actually has a method to its madness (390). But how can you learn to recognize that pattern as a teacher if you don’t at least know that this specific writing quirk X always appears in Student #42’s work? It might not be obvious enough for you to recognize it without first knowing you are looking at the work of Student #42. Right?

Thoughts on Romantic Writing Instruction

Ken Macrorie in “Telling Writing” encourages us to write unselfconsciously. He advocates uninhibited creativity and authenticity. He cares about the discovery of “some kind of truth” when we write in the sense of “a connection between the things written about, the words used in writing, and the author’s experience in a world she knows well” (300). In a writing class, his instructional emphasis would clearly be Romantic.

This week, I found myself sympathizing with his views. A close friend of mine who is a relationship counselor once told me that there is no such thing as “constructive criticism.” She said that criticism can’t be constructive because people can’t take it impersonally. It puts us on the defensive, at least a little, which doesn’t make us receptive to learning. To me, that thought seems closely related to the idea that a teacher can’t directly impart knowledge to a student (something we can see by looking at the shortcomings of the pipeline model). What a good teacher actually does is lead a student to discover a truth on her own. That is the way real learning occurs. In my first blog entry I wrote about struggling to tutor my brother for his English classes. Melissa K commented on it, writing that “[i]nstead of correcting people, it's important to have them correct themselves. That's where we come in more as a guide than a teacher.” I think she was saying the same thing there that I am saying now in a more long-winded way. A good teacher act as a “guide” to her students as they come to make their own discoveries.

Now, I'm not committing myself to complete agreement with Macrorie. I also do not know if I completely believe that there is no such thing as constructive criticism. I just think that there is truth in this worth considering— a truth, that is, and not the truth, because no one “knows surely what that is” (300).

Writing Relativism

We spent some of Thursday’s class talking about what good writing is. One composition syllabus mentioned in Kitzhaber’s paper began this way: “The Department of English affirms that the work of this first semester should train the student in accuracy in English composition” (259).

So we also talked a little about “accuracy” in class, and its position as a buzzword whose meaning is more ambivalent than we might at first expect. However, I found the term so persuasive I had to explore it a little for myself. Dictionary.com defines it as “the condition or quality of being true, correct, or exact.” All of those descriptors sound pretty, but how they should be understood in a context of practical application to someone’s writing?

I mean, is writing “true” when it deals with facts, or when it provides evidence for its assertions? I can think of an essay that dealt entirely with facts and still managed to come off as untrustworthy and false because the writer’s voice felt inauthentic. Is it “correct” when it contains a certain number of sentences in each paragraph, or when it is impeccably punctuated? Is it exact when it is concise, meaningful, and to the purpose? What does “concise,” “meaningful,” and “to the purpose” really mean anyway?

The trouble is that these are all evaluative words. They demand a subjective point of view from which to define and value them. That leads again to the question: what is good writing? We know what good math is. We know what good engineering looks like. Why is good language so finicky and difficult to pin down? Is its nature essentially subjective, or have we just failed to discover the secrets of its success up to now?

Parker, English, Learning, Teaching

The historical development of what we currently think of as the study of English Literature and Language is interesting. However, the parts that struck me most about Parker's article and our subsequent class discussion were certain ideas about teaching and learning. For instance, the most interesting part of Parker's paper (to me) was the point at which he associated the fact that kids today have trouble reading and writing with the idea that teaching English is a fairly young discipline. He says, kind of rudely, that teachers of English are like "children in [their] ignorance or innocence, still fumbling and faddish or lacking well-defined goals" (6). Presumably this is because what "English Language and Literature" means has changed radically over the last 100+ years, so who we are and what we are supposed to be doing is not always clear.

I think most of us feel, however, that English would be a more full-bodied discipline if it incorporated more aspects of Rhetoric and Oratory. I mean, freshman composition (that modern adaptation of Rhetoric) isn't going away. It's a mainstay of English Departments. So let's take what's there and run with it!

On a complete side note, Dr. Kemp made two remarks in Tuesday's class that really stuck in my head: first, that people who are good at English are generally people who were inculcated with the rules and conventions of the subject through years and years of personal reading, and second, that it is very tough to teach someone to express themselves skillfully and honestly when all you do is correct them.

The first point resonated with me because it is exactly how I learned to read and write. My father read to me daily until I learned to read to myself, at which point I became inseparable from the public library. Over the years, I developed an intuitive sense of what words meant and how to manipulate them effectively.

The second point sounded very similar to the way I used to talk to my little brother about English when he had problems. I would show him what was wrong with his papers, but I didn't know what to do beyond giving him the relevant rule for it and hoping that would solve the problem. Sometimes he didn't seem to be breaking any particular rule, but his writing still felt awkward and just not quite right. We both got frustrated at these times--especially me, because I was supposed to be the one who knew what I was doing.

I guess all that is to say that I'd never thought about those things too deeply before. I feel like I have a new awareness of the gap between my abilities as a student and what my responsibilities will be as a teacher. I definitely need to turn a more critical eye to how I myself read and write so that I can articulate what I know more effectively. Understanding where English Literature and Language comes from and having a sense of where it should go in the future is another part of that.