Fun with Teaching Week 3

A blog on teaching, learning, and tech writing. And Kenneth Burke by proxy.

          Time is of the essence. "The essence" is a phrase that is much abhored by pragmatists like Kenneth Burke because we don't really know what "essence" is, and never will.
          I'm starting to think that I will never know how to teach the essence of technical writing.
          I'm great with tutoring, writing lab, style teaching when it comes to instructing students on how to write things like proposals and resumes and scholarship essays--you know, writings that are primarily defined by their social impact, writings that are means to an end outside of communication. (Yes, I know Carolyn Miller says that ALL genres are evidence of social action outside mere comunication. But the "point" of literature is rarely seen as "moving an audience toward incipient act," as Burke would name it. Literature is pretty.)
          How does one teach what one loathes to do? Tech writing makes me itch uncomfortably because it is too transparent in its aims. "This is a proposal. I am proposing. I am moving my audience."
Alas, I may well weep with sighs deep
....and also my writing is full unready
How shall I do now for to excuse me?("Everyman")
Of course, Everyman was writing a different kind of proposal, a confession. I confess I don't know what to say about style. I confess I've largely made this an issue of plain old transparent rhetoric.
          Even if a proposal does what it is supposed to (propose a project by garnering interest in a party who has the means to make the project happen), it may not be pretty. It may not be subtle or clever or a good read. It may not make me put "hmm" in the margins. Even if all the threads are there, all the good points, and some interesting thinking, it could be a bad read. My "rhetoric of identification" fails quickly when it comes to talking about the rhetoric of tech writing. Burke is hard to fit in here.
          The classes themselves are fine. The students are getting used to me, which is good. I have addicted several of them to coffee, which is good because at least they're awake.
          The time goes by quickly, it is always of essence. Yet I cannot push them as quickly as I would like. When I see learning happening, I am not going to be a disruption.
          Today I began "organization" by cutting out paragraphs and making them rearrange them. As per usual, the students were upset when they realized I wasn't going to tell them whether they got the order "right." "Right" was not the point. How are we going to use this later? I always try to emphasize that "use" does not mean that they will be graded on it. Unlike high school, not all projects are given little percentages of the final. Some projects are for learning's sake only. Most students realize that this is actually in their favor. Some, however, get angry and tell me my assignments are "useless" on the course evaluation sheet. A means to an end? Are we so teleological?
          I try to be transparent. I try to tell them why we are doing certain activities. Some days I ask them to tell me why I've made the assignment: "What am I thinking here? Why did I choose these questions for you?" By making my teaching practice part of the discussion, they realize the web of authority around them. I can't remove my authority, but I can make my choices explicit.
Such a damn Foucauldian sometimes. I wish I could be a grammar nazi. It'd be easier.
          As I walked around, I saw good conversation happening. Before I even asked them to consider it, they were asking "Why do you think that's a conclusion? It looks like a body paragraph to me because..." When I asked them to write their justification down, they had trouble, though...they couldn't see that I was asking them to write down exactly the things they were saying. Instead they tried to make definitions. "A conclusion is________." That's not quite what I was going for, but a good practice time, nonetheless.
          The SRAs were due today. I'm going to mark them this weekend. I think I'll take a page from Northeastern's grading recommendations for once, and write a few individual comments on the papers themselves, then type up a set of "whole class comments" about style, grammar, etc. What I see good, patterns of "error" I see. It's not error; it's just a different set of conventions for a different discourse group. The theory echoes in my head every time my language subsumes my beliefs. I still try to call them errors, even though my subconscious doesn't really believe in mistakes.
          Where does the time go? I was barely handing them the fragmented essays before it was time for them to go. Where are those long pauses that used to happen?
          Mom asked "Is it because Purdue is easier?" A good question. Is this approach "easier" than Ways of Reading? It does not demand the academic rigor, the theoretical musings. But I am Essentially teaching the same thing: the how of communication. I will still speak of grammar as "ethos." I will still ask them to find points of "identification" in the essays (now ethnographies) they read. How is s/he trying to move you? What is s/he moving you toward?
          I know I should be more explicit with my use of rhetoric. I should tell them that this course is all about identification, ethos, etc. Instead, I've defined the terms and am using them frequently. It's not really modeling though. I should do that better.
          And I know my faults during class time: I forget student names, I sometimes gravitate more toward the extroverts, I don't always call on the quiet ones who are too afriad to talk on their own. I know, I know, I know. But I also know my own learning process. Once I identify a lack in my abilities, it is only a matter of time before that skill suddenly comes to me, overnight, when I'm not looking. Like how lesson planning has suddenly become very obvious of late; I know somehow what activity fits best with what. Like how I learned to ride my bike only after shutting myself up in the basement with it, exiling my parents to the upstairs; one day down there, I could just suddenly ride.
Like how Burke made my whole jumbled honors project arrange itself as a question not of Marxist literature, but of "literature as equipment for living;" how my own assumptions and major premises became explicit in one reading of the Rhetoric.
          Patience in waiting for my brain/body/soul whatever (no more corporeal divisions, Plato) to decide that NOW is the time for Amylea to understand things is the difficult part. Patience, as we said in elementary school, is a virtue, not a chicken.
          So one day, I will do so much better in domain C, or whatever domain it was that was concerned with my ability to manage the classroom in an egalitarian manner befitting all my students' levels of ability. And I won't even know I'm doing anything different until someone shows me what I've done.
          It's a lot more fun that way.