Lambasting and the Dead Kennedys

Blogging. I suppose that this is the moment when I should evaluate my place in all of this racey bloggetry and tie my ideas into those of Barton in all of his rational-critical debate, all the while publicly, openly using this public sphere in an attempt to sythezize my thoughts on the matter.

This won’t be an epiphany entry I assure you, dear reader, so stop shuddering. What is the future of rational critical debate? Can it be left up to the (at (large)) public to set up a self-policing system for the internet?

The "Internet can serve either to "reflect in every institution the logic of modern production" or
enable "the flexible testing of possibilities and the development of the new—not hierarchical
and standardization but variety and growth of the capacities required to live in a more complex
world"

I enjoy the idea of rational critical debate because it hints to me of that sometimes elusive productivity within a discussion session. But can the public really operate with a non-hierarchical system set up for communication and the distribution of ideas? When I ask that question, I’m not asking if people can operate under a non-hierarchical system, but rather, will it actually happen? It seems that the idea of unrestrained freedom will begin to run into walls after a time. Someone will want to be able to own the popular idea– it becomes pop culture owned by the rich and displayed on a mantle piece.

To me, right now, the internet is rebellious pop-culture, destined to go the way of The Dead Kennedys or Cindy Lauper, except for the strength of the public.

So I guess what I’m pondering around is that while I’m not a huge fan of blogging and I don’t have much experience or faith in the wiki, at least we have it. "We" have the option to contribute and correct and question. We, as a pubic, have the right to our opinions, and the right to post them, no matter how crazy, insightful, or inane. The web has become our own interpretive project.

Wild purple roses and gnarly sticks and one of those electric can-openers from GE

"What are we likely to carry with us when we ask that our relationship with all technologies should be like that we have with the technology of printed words?"
What is the "technology of printed words"?

Does this technology pertain to comprehension of writing in a technology based medium or does it merely delineate the dividing line between engine/ering of thought and the human/ity of thought?

The idea of computers in the writing classroom is one that has been lit upon a few times this semester. Dusted, discussed in brief and tossed aside and stored under the idea of academic progression.

My point (of weapons) isn’t to chose a side in this argument/diss/ent/con/cussion. It’s merely to dazed, bleary eyed, stare at a screen through glasses (which have been tinted so that I don’t get a headache from the glare), and think about what I am doing right now, think about what I’m posing/posturing about.
The computer in the writing classroom could be seen as that annoying machine in the garden.

Get it out! It’s ruining the ambiance of my nature/al state.
I want to pull the weeds myself. I want to till the land with my own scuffling tools.

Until my hands become too dirty. Until my fingers are sore. Until I can’t bend anymore. Then I retire to the sidelines to straighten my back, to take off my gloves, to put down my trowel. Upon my straightening my eyes/regard/intellect/opinions fall again/light upon that horrid machine gleaming in my organic primitivism.
It’s a challenge.

We intelligentsia bow to progress. With the lowered gaze of respect/shame we ac/knowledge what we are confronted with in this, our organic classroom. The room of holistic rubric. As if that structure could be defined as such. We cover our structure with the bright blooms of the moon flowers and the marigolds. We cover the engine and the battery and the blades with sunflowers. We drape our beautiful green ivy over the imposing steel. We tried to adapt. We try to use equal amounts of nature in our gardens.
But it is so easy to not dig by hand. It is so easy to not use a pen.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The scratches of the pen/quill/trowel are drowning in the marching tap of technology.
My hands won’t be as calloused this spring.

No one will be able to tell how much I love my garden, my potatoes, my lettuce, my corn.
But maybe I liked that my hands were sore. Maybe I liked that my muscles ached and that I had to spend hours in the blinding/suffocating sun so that I could get the radishes in on time.
Maybe that’s why I plant my garden every year.

Machine in the garden.
Computers in the composition classroom.

I’ve had a few days to think about what I wrote in class on Wednesday, and for the most part I’ve decided that I don’t really believe a word that I said/wrote. Sure, a teaching pedagogy is good to have. It’s good to identify yourself as having a certain type of teaching slant.

"My fellow teachers, I define myself as skew expressionist."

"Well class, I lean subjectivly from my podium, with just the smallest bit of objectivism–for the grade assignation ability, you understand."

Should teachers really be content to pick a category and shoot for that.? Aren’t most decisions made arbitrarily in the first place? Based on the strength of a wind gust and whether or not a penny lands heads up? I guess what I’m stuck on is how "we" ( the royal We) as teachers decide to teach? Or maybe how much of our learning style is pushed upon students?

I personally cannot stand --fill in the blank-- therefore I will not teach it.

I would honestly like to type that I’m a subjective teacher. I would like to say that I change my mind constantly based upon every situation. How horrible would that be? Would that be any better than looking at an essay and taking off ten points because one aspect of the MLA format was not used? I suppose consistence is a good idea. Consistency and clarity.
Maybe I also suppose that I don’t really know what my teaching pedagogy is. Maybe I get aggravated by the fact that I should even feel the need/desire to be able to say that I identify with one or the other or the other or the other.
Maybe I’m assuming that picking a pedagogy has far too many implications.
I’ve taught in one classroom, and all I really took from those classes was that I could not teach everyone the same way. Some people needed specific attention. Others wanted group work. Some students couldn’t stand to be helped. So, how do I, as a "teacher," wade my way through that information, through the individualized needs of thirty people, ages 14-68?
Does it matter?
I'm aware that all teachers are not inherently "bad," and neither are they inherently "good." And that most students aren't going to be ruined for academia simply because s/he had a few bad experiences.
Does good teaching require categorization?

But also, can I Vin diagram my thoughts in a sincere and unbiased manner?

You're right, Craig

I should have said something.

I’ll just write what I was thinking during those fifty minutes, and maybe that will make up for some of it.

This is where we as intellectuals separate, splinter and co/llapse into our di/tri/vided subject/ivisms.


I like ol’ Vic. You’re right, class, he’s not a man of clarity, but is that such a bad thing? Does/is everything (need) to be so c/leaved and sapless as to render all readers prostrate with comprehension? Dare I say no? Dare I say that no one understands what I understand?
I wrote in another post, "When I say Horse, what do you think of?"
I think of my youngest brother. He had laryngitis when he was twelve. We spent two weeks making up sign language in order to communicate, but mainly to cast aspersions against my older brother when he was in the room.

Of course, the words Horse and hoarse aren’t spelled the same, but that just adds something to my definition.

This individual response is what Vitanza is digging for/cultivating/planting.
There is a state of individualism that goes into personal thought. A state which is influenced by past experiences and vague/fugue opines that I, as I am not you, will never under/stand. And I suppose that is quite alright, because it drives me to try to understand. It begs me to take my feelings and combine it with a dozen other thoughts which are floating, aimless, above my head.
I think that fuzzy gray condition is the shape/spatial arrangement of something as different from its substance/trapezoid from which Vitanza is stuck and wandering/wondering.
In class, we spoke of Sophistic argument as being manipulative and lacking a point. Maybe. Does it manipulate or simply present. Sometimes pre/suming a unequi/vocal answer to any question can be a shameless display of ignorance. To expect someone to follow a recipe and an outcome of thought is not proliferating critical cerebration. I think that it presents options. It urges the reader to come to a conclusion, or at least formulate an idea.
Or at the very least think about it some more.

I honestly believe that Vitanza uses the con/muddled language because he wants to present something else. He wants to present the in/fin/ite/beginning options. Vitanza uses word-play and metaphor to illustrate that every word is subjective and suggestive.

ThEYEorize.

What do you think of that word? What does that word entail and presuppose for you-- the reader/thinker?
Its definition changes with each person, because how could one person presume to hold the definite definition for any given word, for any given emotion?
He uses political revolutions/historical events to incur emotions, to foster knowledge, to find that lagging attention.
Words foster emotions, and the desire to understand. So, if a confusing sentencial relation makes the reader need to read and re-read then maybe that is all he wanted in the first place.
I’m not saying that I know what he was saying in his essay, only that he was probably saying quite a few things.
Well, anyway, that’s how I feel about it.

Le brouillard de l'etude

The writing process.
We've spent this entire semester learning how to teach writing. As a graduate student, I have spent the last three semesters learning the "Writing Process," or was it product?
We're learning to inoculate, to break down, to build up, to ride around, to run around post/modernizing the writing process and the students that we teach. ( I'm using the royal "We" here, since I am not teaching this year, and so can only look at these processes through the dim and unfocused eyes of the outsider.)
But I can see quite clearly with the eyes of the student learning to write.
This week someone touched upon the idea of high school versus college writing. Or maybe the actual subject was "My English Teacher Taught Me During Half-Time." I felt rather lucky during that conversation. My high school English teacher was wonderful. Most of the students hated her because she wouldn't let anyone chew gum during class, and her druthers involved assigning twenty page papers. I dug on her. I was fully prepared for my first semester in college, and I think it was because we wrote constantly in her classes. We generally kept within a very formulaic outline of reader response and criticism, but it certainly didn't hurt me to write more.
So, I'm just wondering about that first semester at the university.
Does it really make or break a writing student? Or is that giving too much credit to 100 and 110 classes?
How does one start to teach writing? How does a teacher get through the fog of learning that is hovering around some of those first year college writers?
How do graduate assistants get rid of the idea that the writing really isn't as bad as all of that?
When I was in high school my math teacher was the woman whom I named as my arch nemesis. Our relationship and interactions were uncomfortable at best.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I still hate math. Walking into a math class makes me want to drop out of school just so that I don't have to deal with any math teacher/pro/fessor ever again.
I know that every teacher is not Mrs. Clark, but I always see her 50's hair and huge glasses when I encounter arithmetical theorem.

So how do teachers deal with the presuppositions of the student?
Any teacher can reference those icons until his/her breath is absolutely gone, but when all of those greats have death-rattled their way into the sunset, it really is up to the Teacher to tear away those prejudices.

Because, you know, I really loathed Mrs. Clark.

IntraPersonal Communication: Office Politics in the CLASSroom

I believe that every semester on whatever day that Friday the 13th falls upon, I start to re-evaluate my role as an aca/pandemic in the classroom. I start to scrutinize my place in the student/teacher/student trifecta and bemusedly question pretty much everything that goes along with it, but mainly I analyze. I like to look at the student/ teacher relationship, because, it is, for most of us, is a sub/stantial part of our lives

Should I have tried harder these past few months?
Does it matter if my teacher actually likes me?
Does it matter if I actually like my teacher?
Am I an ignorant person ?
Am I doing well in the class based on any of these questions or their not-so-forthcoming answers?

I remember school as something..dare I say...cool, until I started attending. My older brothers climbed on and off bus number 7 five days a week. My mom bought them new shoes, and pencils, and crayons, and plastic boxes in which to place those crayons.
Then I went to school and learned that the bus was possibly the worst thing to ever enter my life. Large. Yellow. Rank. Unnerving.
The bus took me to a place that was just as large, yellow, rank and unnerving.
If I were to go out on a limb and actually write that this has been the standard for the whole of my education, would that limb hold me?
This has been every classroom, every assignment, almost every teacher, every hallway for the duration of my academic career. Granted, there are those students who have experiences that are quite nice---those wonderful academic careers full of dandelion wine-- those classes in the shade.
But not always.
So, if I know the abject horror I feel toward most classes, how can my personal teaching pedagogy hold my students to higher standards?
Should I assume that every student is academically prepared for every class and for every assignment?
Should I raise an eyebrow at every seemingly ludicrous question?
Or should I just answer the question and let it go?

Abnormal discourse

"The first steps to learning to thing Better,and learning to converse Better and learning to establish and maintain the sorts of social context, the sorts of community life that foster the sorts of conversation members of the community value." -K. Bruffee
Academic discourse truly is an amazing beast. It is unbearably pompous and I can't help but cheer those students who try to engage in "abnormal discourse"---- when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of the conventions governing that discourse, or who sets them aside." (Rorty ref. by Bruffee--Conversation of Mankind, 429)
I know that there are students out there who tend to manipulate assignments. I've always been a huge proponent of socially accepted rebellion-- those intellectual revolutionaries. I've participated in the occasional revolution and I've paid for it by not getting an "A." I've paid for it by having to re-write, or conference.
I've become weary of it.
I re-read D. Bartholomae's "Tidy House" this weekend. In his essay he discusses a student he had in his first year of teaching. The student wrote an essay which discussed the fact that he.....thought the assignment was stupid. The student used different language, of course, but that was the gist of it. It made me question the idea of rebellion and resistance within the classroom. Paired with Bruffee's essay, "Tidy House" once again, made me re-evaluate the acculturation that goes on within academia.
So many teaching "techniques" seem to be stifling, seem to be hoop-jumping, and when a student decides to vocalize frustration and annoyance via essay, the student is proverbially put in the corner to think about what s/he has done.
Is it always "wrong" or "right," "correct" or "incorrect" within the classroom?
I disliked the idea of abnormal discourse simply because it set the scene. It was/is abnormal because it isn't normal. Instead of realizing that abnormality has its roots in normality--its causal ancestor-- we set the two up against one another, and we pick one over the other, when, in fact, they are simply variations on a theme.

Other Others

At the University, in our literature courses, in our theory course, the idea of the misunderstood Other usually makes a few appearance and usually decides to hang around for the duration of the eighteen week course. A few students identify, a few students re-define and a few Others remain quiet and re-read the texts in order to understand something “else.”
We discussed the term “Other” in class the other day, and I once again pondered the significance. Every semester that I have heard and discussed this term it has been in reference to something different: race, women, caste. But this semester, being in a classroom chock full of teaching assistants, I feel that this semester the Other has significance in the English 100 and 110 classroom. We read Comp tales forever ago (or was it just two weeks?), and I thought about it then. Those undergraduate students who are taught. Those undergraduate student who are finding their place in their first semester writing class in college. They are the Others this year. They have the trivial place of being the unknown and sometimes misunderstood role of being “rubbish” writers.
Of course, I am at the disadvantage of not teaching them. I really have nothing to do with them. I merely hear the stories from TA’s. But in the classroom, in front of the graduate student, in front of the Associate Professor, in front of the tenured Professor, how can that student not feel at a disadvantage. How can that student not feel as if whatever voice s/he had before is now gone, lost to an academic version of laryngitis?
This will be the first year of learning to write academically. This will be the first year of stifling personal “voice” in order to fulfill that requirement. I have heard some teachers voice bemusement at confused and muddled essays wherein the requirements were not met, or the writing was dry and boring, or there was no essay at all.
I just remember thinking in my undergrad, “Okay, the first essay is the hardest, because you don’t really know what the Professor wants. My Mind or repeat after me.”

Multi-Vocal Listening

In class today, we discussed the idea of research and it’s inherent in/objectivity. Someone brought up the idea of an interviewee bending his/her “story” to accommodate the interviewer.
“That’s not the way people work,” was the response. Maybe, but maybe in certain situations they do censor self. Maybe the story is just a bit different. Maybe one aspect is left untold. I have a difficult time believing that all language is value-free or universal especially in the arena of research. Every researcher has a motive, something to find out, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to research. The questions would not be there to ask.

I mean, when I say "Horse" what do you think of?

Michel Foucault in his essay, “The Discourse on Language,” writes of prohibition in discourse communities. “We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot speak simply of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything.”
There are power struggles in discourse. What should be revealed and what should be hidden in any conversation? How will I, the researcher or the human-subject, interpret your symbols of communication?
“Whose theory, whose language, whose interpretation, and whose narrative voice would prevail?”
Language is subjective. Language is interpretive. Most things are, in fact, up for grabs.

Traveling with Exxon

I personally have never been a huge proponent of “freewriting.” I don’t like participating in the activity, and therefore, presume that most people couldn’t possibly glean anything from that sort of pursuit.

I must admit though, Elbow made me wonder.

Maybe it is a good idea, or maybe it’s not. Either way he added a certain amount of insecure charm to the whole process of not being able to string a few words together in some sort of pre-approved of rhetorical structure.

I taught English to...well, highschool dropouts in Anchorage, Alaska. The goal of the class was for the students to be able to answer a prompt, a basic question–“What are some qualities in a person whom you admire?” in the form of a five-paragraph essay.

It was difficult. Sometimes the students didn’t even understand the question. Some students grew tired of writing and never returned to class. Sometimes I had no clue what I should do with an essay. “Um, yeah, okay, the essay subject is good. Essentially, this is what I’m looking for. But are you aware that you wrote this entire essay phonetically?”

“It’s not right? But I did that free-writing thing. See?” The student showed me two crumpled pieces of paper which had been thoroughly written upon, erased and written upon again.

We teachers were pushed to get students to brainstorm using freewriting and webbing.

I guess what I’m curious about is whether or not freewriting and stream of consciousness writing can be effective in most situations? Is our center of gravity really located around the ability or inability to find topic sentences and the willingness to lose control of our writing?

Does freewriting even make sense beyond the hallowed halls of academia? It seems like a privilege to be able to use this style of writing. The students I had came to class on their lunch breaks. They came for an hour when they could get a friend to watch their kids.
Their goal was to take a test which culminated in a timed five paragraph essay. They didn’t have an hour to spend freewriting.

I’m not saying that I don’t agree with Elbow. I guess I’m just remembering the kid who just didn’t want to write a lot, or the girl who didn’t care enough to spend time growing and cooking. “Actually, I’m only here because my mom said that she would buy me this Coach purse if I came. No offense. Hey, do you want to go to this party with me tonight? There’s always tons of mushrooms. You should come.”

I think this would be the appropriate time to hearken back to Comp Tales.

I never saw that student again.