How Amy Gets Her Groove Back...again

Alternate Title: What the Hell am I Teaching This Semester? Part I
I've always hated the last week before school starts.
The last weekend I hate even more. It used to be that I'd get awful panic attacks about the task (why such a harsh word for fourth grade? Or even ninth?) ahead of me. Sometime in high school it shifted--I had panic attacks in which I was worried about having panic attacks.
I know for a fact that I never got a good night's sleep until the second Tuesday of the school year. Not even weekends.
So here I am, awake again at 6 a.m. because I just had to take that nap around 5 p.m. What better to do than to read the book my students will be working from?
The title is "Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research." It's difficult to tell how much we will be relying on a "fieldworking" approach, but I can tell already that the philosophy of the writing programs here are much different from the "Question everything and everyone" subverting exercises that Bartholomae and Petrosky wished their students to engage in. I don't doubt we will be looking at and re-evaluating assumptions, but suddenly the idea of "reading against the grain" will be supplanted by a reading of the culture related to the text, not the author's attempt (or lack thereof) to imbed ideologies in my poor, naive kiddos. The introduction says that the book's authors want the students to act on their discoveries. I feel like there will be less me dragging them through the mud of some Foucauldian nightmare, grading them on their ability of not sinking.
I love Foucault, I really do. I just want my kids to be able to write when they're done with my Composition class, not just subvert things.
Subverting is exhausting.
One of the questions for the orientation week is "What is the difference between ethnography and journalism?" This is a good question. One that came up several times as I taught Fight Club and Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. The students seemed to think it had something to do with the "accurateness" or the "truth" of the writing. The transparency of "simply reporting the facts." And maybe at one point I could say that that was the goal of (although it could never truly acheive it) journalism. Journalism back in the throes of Woodward and Bernstein. Before 24 hour cable news programs.
But now what? No one but Fox News pretends they are "fair and balanced." We all know who owns whom (or at least that they are owned).
The book says the readings will draw from "fiction, non-fiction, and journalism." This sentence seems strange; isn't journalism non-fiction? Is journalism a genre of its own, is its job so different from the work of "non-fiction" that we have to point out the divide?
The concerns of this book seem to be drawn from Mary Louise Pratt's idea of the contact zone; of outsiders and insiders, self and other, questioning the daily practices (not those large ideologies) of a specific group that has somehow (ah, there's the question) divided itself from the rest.
Kinda like journalism?
They encourage "close looking and listening skills" (1) as opposed to close reading. But in order to "read" don't we have to first look and listen? Before we can give meaning to what we've just seen, we must acknowledge what it is we've seen. Clifford Geertz's "thick description" is misleading because it is both a close looking (for both the writer and the person reading the context being described) and a close reading. Can we ever really just look and listen?
It's been a while since I could just look. There is always a "hmm" at the tip of my tongue whenever I actually pay attention. Paying attention all the time, as Dr Susan Wall said, must be exhausting. We can't live like that. Like most people, I just block things out and move along merrily, unless wanting to engage in a "hmm" moment with friends. When a text--by which I mean a film or piece of writing or music or art--is presented to me, I automatically do a close looking, listening and reading all at once. I just jump from "What is this?" to "What does this mean?"
I wonder if my students will have similar problems, or if I am clouded by my own strange behavoirs. Now I remember that I wasn't always this way; it began when I took that Sociology class at OSU-M, and continued as Lou and I sat in Sue Biesecker-Mast's class (Mass Media, was it?). Sue's "hmm" became our "hmm."
I remember when it all broke for me; it was the night before the first Mass Media paper was due, and I had forgotten the paper was due at all. I finally listened to what Sue had asked us to do: I was too stressed to try do anything else. I looked at the ad I was analyzing, and began with its semiotics. Color? Shape? Angles? People? Text? Etc, etc. Typing furiously, trying to reach those ten pages, I wrote down every detail I could think of. The act of describing in that haze of tension made me stop making assumptions, and instead of seeing some random ad from some girly mag I saw the story that caused it to come into being, the ideology that made that ad materialize itself that way. As I finished the "description" section of the paper, looking at all my evidence, the intentions and ideologies of the ad became transparent to me, and I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before.
I thought, It's just like journalism. It's clearly not, but that was my thought. It was clean, organized, and there were sources to back up every comment I made. My opinions stopped whirling around each other into the abyss of "Vague, has no point. D-". Things started to have heirarchies. As my ability to clear all the assumptions from my opinions increased, so did my writing ability.
And none of it had to do with Freshman English. I could write a research paper; I have always been damned good--sometimes too damned good--at research. I could talk about how essays worked together to form a "theme." (Oh God! Not the Theme Paper!). But it was always the same thesis: "They're the same in how they x, but different in their idea of y." Which is probably why I get on the cases of students who do those theses. Because I know that in order to make claims they make with that weak thesis they have noticed other, bigger things, but are afraid of their sentences scrawling right off the off white bounds of Microsoft Word and into that territory: "I'm not really sure what you're arguing here."
Am I ranting? Yes I am. But usually in those rants, I find hints of things to share with others who are smarter than me, thus making me seem smart in the process. In time, I will go back over this, and listen to myself, see my own motivations and assumptions that drive these words, this organization and discover questions I have not yet asked, and answers to some that I have already.
How do you tell a bunch of scared 18 year olds that they might not have the answers? That you might not? That there may be no answers to all those teen-angst ridden questions they wasted the last 5 years on? That's when they looked the most scared: When I told them to argue either side, that both were right. Clifford Geertz is imposing Western views and Clifford Geertz is undoing Western assumptions .
Gotta love both/and. It's one of those things I can almost understand now.