What are Students Thinking? -- Quoting the Dictionary

See the explanation of the "What are Students Thinking" post series, where I explain what these posts are about and what they are for.

For this first "What are Students Thinking" post, I'm considering why students quote dictionaries. This is one of those freshmen cliches that all teachers of first year writing know and abhor. Composition theorists have mentioned this problem in discussions of the positivist views of language many students hold. Our students, like many people outside of English departments, have an understanding of  language as fixed and definite. To them, words have explicit, singular meanings, and these meanings may be found in dictionaries. Dictionaries, to our students, are catalogues of the factual, unassailable, exact and, correct meanings of particular words. There is, for them, a naturalized understanding of the way words work, as if their meanings come from God, who directly inspired the prophet Webster.

When I talk about definition arguments with my students, I begin by foregrounding where definitions come from. Most students have never considered that dictionaries are actually written by people. Thus, definitions are, after all, the opinions of a collection of human authors and their editors. To demonstrate this, I like to show students definitions from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which includes such gems as:

oats: a grain, which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Centuries removed from Dr. Johnson's dictionary, we can see the very obvious class structure implied in this definition. Yet we take our own modern dictionaries as purely un-ideological repositories of linguistic truth. We don't register (or even know about) the political aims of Noah Webster's spelling reforms, undertaken in order to differentiate (read: un-Frenchify) American English. Instead, these definitions are taken to be givens.

For our students, this means that a dictionary definition gives them solid ground. After all, in asking students to write argumentative papers, we are forcing them to confront the continent nature of the conversations they join. They're finding out that truth is not as solid as they've perhaps been made to believe. The very process of argument emphasizes this. We all make contributions to a conversation, and no one is quite right, and maybe no one is quite wrong either. This is disconcerting, especially for students who just want the right answer, the one that's going to get them a good grade.

A dictionary definition, then, is at least one unassailable truth, a thing that cannot be attacked. A word, at least, is what it is and no one can count off because they disagree with it.

But even in the argument of definition papers I assign, where the continent, unsettled nature of particular terms and concepts is actually the point, I see these dictionary definitions cropping up. In fact, in the unit my classes are finishing up, we emphasized the continent nature of words, and talked about the histories of these dictionaries in order to denaturalize my students' views of language.

I even went so far as to just flat tell them, "you should not quote the dictionary in your papers for all the reasons we've been talking about." After all, the whole point was for them to build their own definitions and argue for their legitimacy.

Yet when the first drafts came in, I found dictionary definition after dictionary definition. What gives? Did students not believe any of the things I'd said about where these definitions come from? Did they just flat fail to listen? This seems like a pessimistic view of my impressively involved students. As I said in the intro to this series, I'm much more interested in the rhetorical choices students are making when they fail to meet expectations, especially those I've made pretty explicit. Students know that these definitions are not solid facts, but rater opinions. They know that the point of this assignment is to make definitions on our own. So why would they, nevertheless, default to these dictionary definitions?

A few of them actually cited the definition in order to problematize it. They quoted the definition then went on to write about how deficient the definition, and this culture's understanding of the concept, actually are. This is actually a fairly sophisticated use of these definitions. If I react only to the fact that the broke my "rule" against quoting dictionaries, I fail to give them credit for doing something that is actually quite advanced. Instead, maybe I have to consider such moves as a fair exception to my rule. But what of students who make the more typical move of using the definitions as the final authority?

Nancy Sommers, David Bartholomae and others have written about the difficulty in helping students to develop a sense of agency and authority in their writing. One of our tasks as first year writing teachers is to enculturate students into the expert world of academe. Part of our job is to help them sound like experts, even before they really are. But our students seem have a great deal of apprehension about this. After all, their role in education has always been as receptors of knowledge--vessels into which knowledge is poured by teachers who are assumed to know more than them.

The kinds of writing most of them have done before coming to college illustrate this. Before coming to college, students spend a great deal of time writing book report in which their goal is to prove they've read the book, essay tests where their goal is to show they've internalized the course material so that they have become conversant with it, and other such performative writing tasks. So, even in their writing, their goal has always been to show that they have learned other people's knowledge.

Yet, what we are asking them to do is to contribute knowledge--to create it. In asking them to formulate definitional arguments, I am asking them to assume the role of the expert. Students seem reluctant to do this. Again, their role has always been to learn from the experts, not to be them. Asking them to become experts has disoriented them. It may even feel presumptuous to them to assume such a role. They respond by defaulting to someone else's expertise, as if to say "I may pose my definition, but at the end, I'd better provide the real definition by the real expert."

So how do I counter this? How do I encourage students to assume their own agency and expertise? How do I convince them that their definitions are as valid as those written by interns and editors at Webster's, and are in fact probably better (because they haven't been simplified into one sentence).  These are open questions, but answers that we cannot arrive at unless we ask better questions than "weren't you listening when I said not to quote the dictionary?"

What are Students Thinking?

Writing teachers are full of pet peeves. This is perhaps inevitable since every time we experience writing habits we find distasteful, we do so while grading a huge stack of papers. This means that we experience these over and over so that it seems like language is infested with these things. The common response of many who teach writing is simply to complain a lot. We create lists of freshman cliches, which we share with one another or sometimes with students (I once had one such list designed to help students find these in their own writing. It was tellingly entitled "Ugh Words"). We create elaborate jokes, send terrible students sentences back and forth to each other, and create snarky internet memes (ironically, about the terrible things the internet is supposed to be doing to student writing). I myself have written a series of five-pararaph essays about why the five-paragraph essay is so bad.

What we often forget to do, to our own shame, is to try to figure out why students do these things. Perhaps this is because we assume that these problems in our students' writing exhibit some kind of natural deficiency in their processes, work ethic, or with the students themselves. In other words, we assume that the problem is with our students, and not with our ability to teach them. Students have these problems because they are lazy, waiting until the night before the paper is due without time to really revise or evaluate their own writing, because they simply aren't listening to us in class when we tell them what [not] to do, or because they just don't care that much.

I, on the other hand, prefer to eschew utterly pessimistic views of our students and the work they do, mainly because such views are not particularly helpful with regard to my own teaching. It is, instead, much more helpful to look at these common problems in our students' writing, not as natural deficiencies or personal attacks against me personally, but as rhetorical choices our students make. In other words, when these students go awry, what were they trying to do, why did it fail, and how do we help them do what they were trying to do in more acceptable ways.

With that in mind, I'm beginning a new segment of this blog that deals especially with these peevish problems in student writing with the goal of theorizing what students are doing when they make common mistakes, or rather, when they write in ways which seem totally acceptable and appropriate to them, but which we hate. Assuming that students aren't doing these things because they hate me and wish to attack me, or because they are idiots who can't be helped, or because the golden age of my university years has given way to the incoherence of net-speak, the goal of this series will be to try to develop our own pedagogies so that we may respond to these problems in ways that are optimistic and constructive.

The first is already in the hopper; it will deal with students who quote dictionaries, and it will drop later tonight or tomorrow. So be watching for it. Now, I'm off to eat tacos.

If a [Digital] Tree Falls in a Forest Full of Falling Trees, Does Anyone Hear It?

In our Teaching College Composition class, we have just discussed J. Elizabeth Clark's "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," a response to Kathleen Blake Yancey's work and call to arms for composition teachers to take up "the digital imperative" by involving our students in engaging digital literacies. Obviously, I'm a supporter of the use of technology to teach and theorize writing (hence, this blog). Many of the literacy skills called for by Yancey, Blake, and others are, indeed, imperatives. But there was one section of Clark's piece that troubled me and that I think smacks a little of what Lanksheare and Knobel have called "boon theory." For Lanksheare and Knobel, this is one half of a binary that includes both "bane" and "boon." For boon thinkers, technology is a panacea, the thing that will finally cure social ills, provide universal access to powerful literacy tools, give agency to those currently without it, and so on. Certainly, the piece as a whole does not display this, as part of its exigency is Clark's understanding that the digital world requires new sorts of critical literacy for our students. Yet, her description some of her particular classroom activities gave me pause.

Her composition courses, or at least those she discusses here, involve online activities including ePortfolios and blogs, which her students are required to perform. In addition to giving students hands on experience with the types of composing many of them will be expected to do in life outside academe, Blake claims that "when they tell their multimodal stories and share them on the internet, their education has an immediate impact on their lives and their interests, allowing them to put their new skills--like research and multimodal composition--into play immediately for audiences that may include their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (32).

Indeed, one of the most promising aspects of including digital components to Composition classrooms is the possibility of building a sense of audience for our students. By writing in forums that are indeed public, it is hoped, our students will have actual audiences beyond us as teachers. Because of this, says Blake, "our students feel pressured to create effective arguments and to respond to critiques of this arguments" (34). It was exactly this possibility that led me to include a blogging component to my composition classes at Oklahoma State in 2010-2011. I believed that asking my students to publish in forums where their writing was indeed public would both cause them to think about forming arguments for actual audience, and that it would also give them a personal investment in the writing that would lead to greater engagement. However, I found that this was not necessarily the case.

In order to give my students a sense of having a real audience, I did a couple of things. The first is that I created a mother-ship blog that gave them potential blogging topics (which related to our course readings), and provided links to blogs by other student groups. Students were required to respond to at least one other blog, but encouraged to read and respond to several. My desire was that we would be able to establish a kind of online community between my two sections in which a healthy and interesting dialogue would take place. The second thing I did was to recruit friends outside the university to respond to some of the first questions I posed. The idea here was to give students the sense that people outside our class, and even our university, would be able to read and respond to these public blogs.

Ultimately, however, I saw little awareness of audience in my students' blog posts. They were often very short, riddled with typos suggesting that students were not proofing their posts, and often read like direct responses to the teacher. In other words, what I saw was that students treated their blogs as if they were simply electronic versions of in-class journals. To be sure, some of the problems were due to the way I assigned the blogs.

For one thing, blogs were written in groups. I intended to do double duty with the blogs in giving students experience both in online writing and in collaborative writing, an important skill in the modern workplace. This meant that whatever wash't finished in the classroom time devoted to blogging had to be finished by the students over the weekend. Most groups ended up simply taking turns finishing the blog over the weekend rather than trying to make time to meet with one another.

Another problem was that the class time devoted to writing blogs was often insufficient. The idea was that students would come prepared with ideas in mind (I eventually created a space on the classes' Online Classrooms, a format similar to Blackboard to encourage discussion prior to class), then they would actually do the compositions in class. Often, however, most of the time spent in class was devoted to settling on a topic, leaving much of the composition itself to occur over the weekend outside of class. Considering the wide range of quality across the posts, I suspect that other group members rarely revised or proofed the post, leaving it entirely to the group member whose "turn" it was.

These problems, either of which could be easily overcome, suggest that students did not necessarily feel more involvement in their blog writing knowing that there was a real audience. Ultimately, I suspect that they understood that their audience was neither large, nor actually public. Students understand, perhaps better than we do, that the sheer volume of communication now being performed online means that just because something can be seen by a public audience does't mean it will be. Students seem to feel that their online, school-based writing is going to be buried by the mass of information now online. Their writing is a tree falling in a forest full of falling trees; their voices are drowned out in the cacophony.

This is not to say that these forms of writing don't still have value, or even that they can't help our students develop a sense of audience. This is only to say that they won't automatically do so. We will still have to work to create real rhetorical situations for our students by creating writing opportunities that will encourage students to build their own audiences. In other words we want students to be performing writing tasks that they will care about and be proud of, enough so that they will advertise their writing to "their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (Blake 32).

Part of this will require us to make these forms of writing more central to our classes. At OSU (as with the university where I now teach) there were programmatic requirements that a certain percentage of the final grade be based on program-wide rather standardized essays. This means that the electronic writing portions of my classes are relatively small, and the students responded accordingly. After all, our students are budgeting their time, therefore they will privilege the assignments that our grading scales privilege. Other types of writing will be seen as extras, or even busy work. After all, in our classes, the grade will always be more important than any audience. So, if we wish for audiences to matter to our students, these audiences must also be important to us.

Advocacy and Agency: On Being a Highly Literate Parent

Allow me to say from the outset that, in this piece, I run the risk of being too forthcoming with regard to my personal life, but it comes from a desire to make sense of my own experiences and to relate them to important lessons for my field. We have just begun the process of having our son, Aodan, evaluated for an Autism Spectrum Disorder. This comes after having seen red flags since the time he was a year and a half or two years old (though we would also probably give anecdotal evidence that he was weird even in utero).  We also don't yet know exactly what we're looking at--if it is in fact as ASD, which all of us who are dealing with him suspect, or possibly something else, like ADHD or even OCD. But Aodan is a bright and sociable child (at least with the many people he knows), so I have little doubt that with proper interventions he can be successful both as a student and in his social life.

Nevertheless, along the road, we have already had incidents in which we have had to deal with behavioral issues. I should note here that Aodan also has epilepsy, for which he takes medication. His first medication was a real problem for him as it made his behavior, whether good or bad, a bit more extreme that it otherwise would have been. This, along with the issues that have led us to these evaluations, have led to at least two incidents where we have had to actively advocate on behalf of our son to keep him in his school.

The first was in his day care last year. This particular daycare is a K3 program, which means that they see themselves as a legitimate school with a full curriculum. As such, they encourage parents not to keep children out of school unnecessarily, as doing so will deprive them of learning. This is one of the reasons we had our children in this day care. But last year, as Aodan began having problems in class, the school began calling us to pick him up because he had been removed from class. Charissa would have to take off to go get him or my father-in-law would pick him up and keep him for the rest of the day. Obviously, this did not sit well with me, especially since the logic of the place was that students were learning and needed to be there. So, for me, his removal from the classroom amounted to a willingness to rob my child of his educational opportunities simply because he was hard to deal with. So, on a day that Charissa had gone to pick him up and taken him to her school where I later picked him up, I went to the school and asked to meet with the director and his teacher's supervisor (surprisingly for a school that size, these were two different people).

I explained to them that I felt that in a school that makes it a point to remind parents that their students shouldn't miss because they would be missing curriculum, the assumption seems to be that this is real and important education. Since this was the case, it was a major problem that my child was missing out on his opportunities. For me, if they were going to sell themselves and organize themselves as a K3 school, they must also have in place the mechanisms that other schools would have, namely, the training and resources to deal with children with learning differences. They needed interventional strategies. They admitted that they did not have this kind of training but that it is something that they agree they should have. The conversation ended with their assurances that they would try to find ways to keep him in school. It was the last time he was sent home from daycare.

This year, the incidents which have led to his finally being evaluated, also landed us in an administrator's office as we had to discuss the possibility that Aodan could be removed from the Open Door program. This is a voluntary program that allows kids to stay in the school building for daycare before and after Pre-K instead of being transported to a different site. Since it is a voluntary program, he doesn't have to be allowed to remain in the program if they deem him to be a problem. After a write up on the very first week of school, my wife and I found ourselves in a meeting once again having to advocate for our son.

This meeting was much more cordial than the one I had had with the daycare the year before. For one thing, these were professional educators in a public school. They knew what they were looking at. So, this meeting mostly focused on how to intervene, how the teacher could see the signs that Aodan was over-stimulated or escalating, and what to do when those things happened. For another thing, these were both people who my wife had worked with in the past. For this reason, these administrators knew that we were educated and involved parents, which protected him from the tendency to write our child off as the bad son of bad parents. Thus, instead of these meetings being situations in which the school was explaining to us that and why they were kicking my son out, we were instead working on solutions to keep him there and help him be successful.

As a literacy scholar interested in access, I have wondered how this experience might be different for a family with less agency. My wife and I make a formidable pair, sitting across the table from school administrators. I'm an experienced college instructor and PhD students in literacy. I also happen to be physically imposing. My wife is an innovative and experienced teacher, a former teacher of the year with an interest in curriculum development for children with special needs, who is currently working on universal design schemes for her music classroom. We out-credential most of the administrators and teachers we come into contact with. This gives us a great deal of agency when advocating for our son, agency not often available to parents who are "less literate."

James Paul Gee, in his book The Anti-Education Era, points out that, "formal schooling is often like this. People are placed in hierarchies where small differences often translate eventually into big ones" (80). This is due to phenomenon noted by Gee known as "kick theory." The way this operates is that small differences early in the educational process eventually translate into large advantages later on. This is because a person who shows an early advantage, even a small one, in a certain area receives a "kick" in a particular direction that will lead to greater advantage. As this process continues and repeats, the person who showed an advantage gets kicked further and further up the ladder. Inversely, I suspect, the person who did not hold the initial advantage initially will get kicked down the ladder.

In his psuedo-scholarly memoir Lives on the Boundary, UCLA professor and literacy expert Mike Rose points out that, "judgements about [students'] ability are made at a very young age, and those judgements, accurate or not, affect the curriculum they receive, their place in the school, they way they're defined institutionally" (128). So, as early as Pre-K in Aodan's case, schools are making decisions about where he will be placed. This necessarily effects the kind of education he will receive. Of course, education has come a long way in understanding and learning how to handle learning differences and disabilities. Far more often than when I was a child, students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms where they are exposed to the same material as every other student. But there remains the risk that a child may be removed to a severe to profound program, special classes, and so on.

Temple Grandin, the renowned Colorado State University animal scientist and agricultural engineer, who also happens to have autism, speaks often about the importance of careful intervention by way of language tutoring, social training and so on in helping children with autism succeed. For me, there are important access issues at stake in these conversations. Grandin attributes her success to the important interventions provided by involved parents of means and quality teachers. Her parents (her mother in particular) were able to provide her with very intensive language therapy and tutoring early on, and they were intentional about filling her life with the kinds of extra-curricular activities that gave her purpose and a sense of belonging. Children who have not had access to such interventions may have far fewer opportunities to overcome their "disabilities."

With our level of education and our connections to the people who run the educational systems in which our children are being taught, Charissa and I have a great deal of agency and ability to provide the things Grandin mentions--things that will help our boys to be "kicked" in the right direction. We will be able to provide interventional strategies that make it much more likely that Aodan will have just as much opportunity to succeed as Beckett, up to and including educating him ourselves.

Less literate, less well-connected, or less priviledged parents are in a much different situation. They may not have the agency to successfully fight with schools who may find it easier just to hide their children in order to keep test scores up. They may not have the resources to pose a serious legal threat to schools who fail to provide equal opportunities for their children. As literacy workers, we need to be aware of these access issues and look for ways to provide agency through advocacy and training for those that need it if they are to advocate for their own children in the ways I'm able to advocate for mine. We have a responsibility to make our public schools as egalitarian as possible, and this is not possible unless all students have equal access to resources that allow them to succeed.

The Impostor Syndrome and University Education, or How Apprenticeship Saved Me

The few days ago, as I walked across the campus of the University of Oklahoma, appreciating the cool morning air and the austerity of the empty campus, with its red-brick gothic and whitewashed neoclassical buildings, I was struck by how different I feel coming to this campus now than I did when I first came to OU as a freshman.

These days, as I walk across the campus, I feel at home here. The recognizable architecture, the landscaping, and the rhythm of a university feels warmly familiar to me. I have, after all, spent much of my adult life at universities. They are where I have done my best and favorite work. So, when I step onto just about any university campus, especially after spending time in the bleak, cheaply built hallways of municipal government, I feel at home, as a child might feel in the warmth of a grandmother's house--if grandma were brilliant and wealthy.

As a freshman, however, I did not feel this way. The university was an intimidating place for me in 1997, as it no doubt is for many freshman today. Though I was living at home, and had several friends from high school there, I was surrounded by people I did not know. I had attended a large high school, with a graduating class of 529. But OU, a relatively large research institution, had more than ten times the number students as my high school (with about 20,000 undergraduates). I had been a successful student in high school with relatively little effort. I had played hockey, been first chair in the band, been in the top chorus, and was the president of the drama club. Yet now I was at a place where nobody cared about all that. Everybody here had been those things. And now I wondered whether or not I belonged. The people were smart, and the campus was huge and beautiful. I, on the other hand, suddenly felt very average. I was the oldest son of parents who had only been to junior college, and who had been working full time jobs and paying their own bills when they were my age. But here I was, spending their money and trying to blend in with really smart kids from wealthy homes (it seemed to me). I felt like an impostor, waiting to be found out.

I did okay at first, but I felt very small. I went from being in first chair in high school to second chair in the second band at OU.  I went from being a relatively popular student to being part of a mass of freshman who no one knew. I saw upper class-men wearing high school letter jackets and proclaiming it to be "Make Fun of Freshmen Day." I didn't know the words, or even the tunes, to the songs we sung to make fun of the Longhorns on OU/Texas weekend. I wasn't invited to away games.The professors didn't know my name and the TAs seemed to see me as a burden. I didn't drink or join a fraternity, and when I went to parties where everyone else was, I was scared to death and I just wanted to go home.

I didn't make it as a freshman. In my second semester, I decided to change my major and I quit taking my music education classes very seriously. I didn't go to the Group Piano final. But I did better in that class than I did in Math for Critical Thinking, a math class that didn't seem to have much math in it. I went to the lecture a few times and sat in the back of a lecture room with about 130 other students where I couldn't see the notes being written on the overhead because I thought I looked stupid in my glasses.  I quit going entirely, thinking I could keep up with the material in the lab. When I realized I couldn't, I quit going to that too. I also stopped going to a Geology class where the professor seemed to enjoy making jokes about "creationists" which at the time I was totally unable to put in perspective. I wasn't offended that he made fun of Christians; I was afraid he would find out I was one and he would think I was stupid. I was starting to become convinced that I was.

After that semester, I was placed on academic probation. I knew that I could retake one of my failing grades and that it would be replaced on my transcript, so I signed up for the summer semester to retake the Geology class, since it would fulfill a general education requirement. The only thing I remember about the class is that it was in Sarkeys (a sky scraper on campus that is rumored to be closing soon due to structural problems) and that the professor talked a lot about Calcium Feldspar. I still don't know what that is. I started going to my girlfriend's house instead of class, and I was suspended after the summer semester.

I served out my suspension at a community college, but I never returned to OU as an undergraduate (in fact, when I got accepted into the PhD program at OU, I had to clear the academic hold from my suspension 15 years before). Instead, I transferred to Harding University, a much smaller and much more expensive Liberal Arts university.

I flourished at Harding. For one thing, I had followed my girlfriend (who I've now been married to for twelve years). This was not trivial. Not only did I have someone to complain to, cry to, and so on, but she was an excellent student. She hung out with people who got together in the student center for study groups, people for whom knowledge was a social event, central to their daily lives. I've since come to learn (and this is an epistemological grounding in my field) that knowledge making is itself a community act. Not only did we learn from one another, but we made learning a privileged social activity. Harding, it seemed to me, was a place where the the smart kids were the cool kids. Also, these people had been here for a couple years already by the time I transferred in as a third year student. This meant that I had people to show me around, people of whom I felt comfortable asking questions. I was privy to insider knowledge that helped me navigate the terrain.

As importantly, I encountered faculty who, unlike those who stood in front of the 130 person lecture rooms of my freshman year, seemed to have a personal investment in my life. One in particular became, and remains, a mentor to me. Steve and Dottie Frye were both professors in my theatre department. Steve taught theory and history, and Dottie was the director of a theatre troupe I was in. I became very close to them both and, along with scores of other students, considered them surrogate parents. I think I gravitated a bit more toward Steve because I was a young man in need of role models.

In my senior year, I worked for Steve and Dottie as an assistant. It was in Steve's office that I decided that I wanted to teach in the university.  Steve kept in his office a jar of bite sized candy bars and a refrigerator full of Coke. Students would put 50 cents into a coffee cup on top of the fridge and take a Coke. We would generally then sit and talk for a while. His office became a lounge for his students. We would drink Coke, and talk to him and each other about the subject matter of his classes or about life outside of it. This made him both a very involved teacher and also a confidant.  Those of us who were in Dottie's troupe were also frequent visitors to their home. We ate together and played with her kids. I even did laundry there from time to time.

The importance of this kind of relationship cannot be overstated. Not only were there important social and emotional benefits to these relationships, but there were important pedagogical implications as well.  Many students experience what is often called "impostor syndrome." This is the jarring and disillusioning feeling that I don't actually belong here. That I am, in fact, not good enough, not smart enough for this new place. I was a mistake by the admissions office and any day now, everyone is going to find out. I'm doomed to failure.

One of the most important aspects of my relationships with the Fryes is that it initiated me into the academic community. A couple years ago, I found a paper that I wrote for one of Steve's classes. It was called "The Rise of the Greek Theatre and the Vast Confusion Surrounding that Rise" or something like that. As I think about the essay now, even the title seems trite. It was full of very commonplace information and arguments that, at the time, I thought were rather daring and new. It was a startling bit of juvenilia. Yet I remember vividly that Steve took it very seriously. I remember working on it with him in his office, and being treated like a serious scholar when I turned it in. I considered becoming a theatre historian. Likewise, when I brought a play into his office, a terrible tragic romance in one act, he insisted that plays are meant to be heard, and so we staged a reading in his office. Again, he took it completely seriously, praising me for my flair for dialogue and giving feedback on the lacking plot (I'm wording this more strongly here than he did ). Years later, when I asked him for a reference for a PhD application (one of many I'd asked him for) after I had been working as a police officer for several years, he told me, "I've always thought you'd be happier in the life of the mind."

It made all the difference for me to be taken seriously. It was an emphatic signal that I did in fact belong. When I got to Harding, I had to work. My classes were being paid for by loans that I am now paying off. It would be tempting to repeat the often made argument that having to pay for my education made me care about it more. Such an argument, at least for me, would be a fallacy. I didn't take my studies seriously because of my own financial investment (I really had no concept of what it would be like to pay those loans off). I took my studies seriously because I was treated seriously. I was made to feel like this was what I was good at--that this is where I belonged. It wasn't my investment that made me want to do well; it was others' investment in me. Even now, I feel the pressure to do well so that I don't let Steve down. Others who have invested in me have been added to that concern: Matt Hollrah who trained me as a teacher and who is partnering with me in a serious literacy work, Ron Brooks who tried to talk me out of leaving OSU, and Lynn Lewis who got pissed and started making phone calls when I didn't get admitted to OU last year.

I still feel the sinking pull of Impostor Syndrome. I felt it when I returned to graduate school four years after I earned my B.A. I felt it when I began a PhD at Oklahoma State and I feel it now that I continue it at Oklahoma a school that denied my application four times before admitting me this year, and where I have now returned full circle. I have no doubt that I will feel it again when I defend a dissertation and when I enter a flooded and embattled academic job market.

But now I feel comfortable, and that makes all the difference. I imagine what the university must look like to students who have come from less privileged backgrounds and I fear for them. What must the beautiful austerity of campus look like to a student who has come from a crumbling, neglected inner city school? How intimidating must the large and impersonal classrooms of lower-division classes seem to those who feel the pressure of starting from behind? How disorienting must this place be to those who have so often been made to feel unwelcome, who were never "good enough" to go to schools attended by the young men and women who now surround them? What must the thirteen story freshman dorms feel like to a student from a town less populous than any one of those buildings (3% of our incoming freshman class comes from towns smaller than their dorm). What does a student think when he hears his suite mates complain about a dorm room that looks much like the project apartment he lived in before he got here?

David Bartholomae, Mike Rose, and others have written about the importance of being initiated into discourse communities--of the careful apprenticeship between faculty and new scholars. As our universities continue to become more diverse, this process becomes all the more vital. Relationships between students and other students, faculty, and even the physical space of the university must be carefully and purposefully cultivated. Our pedagogy must be infused by and must begin with relationship. We must learn to be Fryes.

Testing and College Preparation: What I Learned by Listening to My Students

As a side project in the final weeks of this semester, my Comp II students read and responded to Kenneth Bernstein's lately popular tour de force "A warning to college profs from a high school teacher." The piece, written on the occasion of Bernstein's retirement from teaching high school civics, first appeared in the journal Academe. The article entered the public conversation when it was reprinted for the Washington Post online column "The Answer Sheet." Bernstein, whose retirement happens to coincide with the entry of the first generation of students educated under No Child Left Behind into college, argues that the incessant standardized testing that has come with NCLB has created a generation of students who are unprepared for college. This is because, according to Bernstein, school curriculum from the third grade on is designed to help students pass the yearly tests. This type of pedagogy, which focuses on memorizable and repeatable material, test-taking strategies, and so on, dominates the curriculum, pushing out any pedagogies that inculcate the kinds of critical thinking and analysis expected in college.

This is not a new argument. Even if I think he's right (I do), I have to admit that these arguments are a little tired. Every generation, it seems, has a reason why the next generation is less prepared. So, though I think Bernstein is likely at least partly right, his argument smacks of the Myth of the Golden Age fallacy.  And these arguments are not uncommon. This argument is repeated by critics of NCLB, the new critics of Common Core, and (germane to my own research) by high school teachers convinced that the internet is destroying the English language (it's not, by the way). Such pronouncements that the sky is falling are common in the public conversations about education. What is not common in the public conversation are the actual views of the students effected by these policies. Now that the first of these students have finally reached college, the time is right to ask what they think about their own preparation.

This became the goal of the side project I am relating here. In order to give a voice to these students, my class read about the issue, responded in a couple of online discussion board posts, and finally hosted an open discussion to which we invited interested stake holder experts in the field including our writing director, English Department chair, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and a professor from the education department who specializes in assessment. We also had guests from off campus including a former State Teacher of the Year who is now the program director of a non-profit that supports our state's largest urban school district. (We also invited a couple classroom teachers but, ironically, they were both busy proctoring standardized tests on the day we hosted our discussion). These experts were invited to participate, but primarily as passive audience members who were allowed to ask questions.

Our discussion came primarily from the issues that came up in our discussion board posts, which began with a fairly straightforward question: Bernstein argues that standardized testing under NCLB is the reason students are unprepared for college. So, did you feel unprepared for college? If so, in what ways? On the other hand, do you feel that you were in fact prepared and, if so, what kinds of things prepared you?

I was actually surprised at how many students reported that they did feel like they were prepared for college learning. Admittedly, there are a few of them whose writing caused me to question whether or not they are prepared as they think they are. But by and large, these are typical second semester students, no worse than those I taught when I first started teaching composition in 2007. What was also surprising to me was how few students mentioned testing, or even curriculum, in their posts. Certainly, some of the savvy students knew that these posts were in response to an article about testing, so their answers should probably mention this. But testing was never the center of their posts, and came up very rarely in the narratives we heard during our discussion. This was true both of students who reported feeling prepared and those that didn't.

Many reported that they felt unprepared for the kinds of writing they would do. Others mentioned being unprepared for the work load, having never really had to do substantial and substantive homework before. But most of these students felt that, overall, they were prepared and so these news ways of learning were a matter of adjustment. Those few who reported feeling completely unprepared did not blame testing, or even mention it. Instead, their narratives focused on a lack of support in the classroom. One student, who was raised in a military home, talked about how often he moved to new schools. Most of these schools, he says, were very poor. Teachers were dealing with large class sizes with few resources, where they were having to provide supplies for their classrooms. This led to situations in which the teachers were often over worked and burnt out, and he often felt that he was being left to his own devices to try to learn. Significantly, he never wrote an academic essay, even of the maligned five paragraph variety, until he got to college.

In contrast to his experiences, my students who reported feeling well prepared came almost exclusively from middle class, even wealthy, suburbs. When asked what made them feel prepared, a surprising number of them did not even mention curriculum. Instead, they talked occasionally about involved teachers, and many of them talked about their parents, often mentioning that they were expected to perform well. One student even explicitly stated that what he learned in the classroom had nothing to do with the fact that he feels prepared. For him, most of what is most difficult to adjust to in college does not relate to curriculum, but instead includes the life changes that come with college: getting used to work load, and working a part time job, and living away from home for the first time. For this reason, the people who most prepared him were his coaches and relatives who stressed work ethic and resilience.

Interestingly, these responses suggest that, at least in the eyes of our students, our ability to be successful in college has less to do with coursework than we might assume. Instead, those students who feel most prepared had positive and involved support systems including teachers, parents, coaches and others.

This probably shouldn't be so surprising. In literacy studies, we've known at least since Deborah Brandt began her grounded theory studies of literacy sponsorship that family support systems have far more to do with literate ability than in-school experiences. If this is true in all areas of learning, perhaps when we assess our students' success, we have to begin to look beyond connections between test scores, textbooks, and curriculum. When our schools are failing, perhaps our texts and lesson plans aren't the first place we should look. Perhaps we should figure out where these extracurricular influences are failing or missing, and find ways to intervene in these areas. Standardized tests tell us very little about these things. In fact, as others have argued, standardized tests may do even more harm to these students since tests tend to privilege the kinds of knowledge not available to children in marginalized communities, where these support systems are often most lacking.

Alternative Assessment:

So we may know that the kinds of things we learn about our students through testing them may not actually predict their preparedness for college, but the fact remains that we do need some way to assess our students. We have to find out what they are learning. It might be very trendy for us teachers to hate standardized testing and to talk about how damaging it is. But we are doing little good if we are not able to propose alternative methods of assessment.  With regard to this, we can learn here from our home schooled and private school students.

At the university where I teach, a midwestern Christian university representing a fairly conservative demographic, we have a healthy number of students who were not in public schools, but who were educated in private schools or were home schooled. Most of the students in my class who were educated at home or in private schools had never taken a standardized test except for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. Yet, all of them are at least proficient. A couple of them are among my best students. So we may have much to learn by looking at the ways in which these students were assessed.

One young man reported that his schooling was very independent. He was often learning on his own, reading and completing home school curriculum. In order to assess his learning, his parents made him teach them the material he had been reading. This was, as it turns out, a bit problematic. He reports that his parents, who were not highly educated themselves, often knew less about his subjects than he did. So, he was responsible for his learning in a way that most educators would not be comfortable with. Certainly, his success has come in part through his own ability and self-motivation, but his parents' method of assessment, albeit possibly an accident of their own insufficiency, did some very important things. By having to relate to his parents what he had learned, he had to become conversant with the subject. He had to go beyond the ability to recognize the right answer on a multiple choice test. Insead, he had to achieve literacy of the subject in order to choose relevant knowledge, compress it into manageable parts, and relate it to another person in a communicative way.

Literacy of the subject matter was even more important for one young woman in my class, whose parents were much more purposeful in their assessment. This young woman reports that her parents required a great deal of writing in which she was expected to critically engage her subjects, writing in a way that showed her comprehension of each subject. Her mother's grade, which was not necessarily attached to quantifiable, objective measures (like a test), was assigned based on her mother's impression of how well she did in the subject over the course of the year. It was, in a sense, "made up." Yet, despite never taking a standardized test, and having been assigned grades by arguably dubious standards, she is one my my brightest composition students.

Bernstein's biggest critique of NCLB in general and standardized testing in particular is that tests cannot prepare students for the kinds of critical thinking expected of them in college. Because of this, we're invited to assume, strategies that prepare students for testing privilege thinking strategies that do not depend on critical thinking. Indeed, one of my students related that teachers were often teaching test-taking strategies, aimed at helping students figure out answers to questions they did not actually know. In this sense, and if this is common, a certain amount of public school curriculum focuses not on academic subjects at all, but on how to fool the tests.

What's striking about the forms of assessment more common for my home schooled and privately schooled students is that they don't just assess what a student has learned by testing their knowledge on a multiple choice test. Instead, their methods of assessment (critical essay writing, "teaching" the material) have pedagogical aims of their own. In relating what they had learned, these students also had to become conversant with the material, synthesize it, and construct arguments from and about it. In these models, assessment does double duty. It tests a students knowledge of their subjects while also teaching the skills, conventions, and ways of thinking privileged in college classes.

Certainly, these forms of assessment aren't quantitative, and thus don't necessarily carry the pretense of objectivity. But they are better. And so public school systems may have much to learn from these methods that might help us to develop forms of assessment that are more productive for our students.

The Rhetoric of My Office

This year, for the first time ever, I have my own office at the institution where I teach. Having to choose things to hang on the walls and deciding which books would need to come from home to sit on the bookshelf in my office was a new experience for me. So, as I added things over the course of the first semester, I became aware of just how conscious I was about the choices I was making (I don't know why that should have been surprising to me, but it was). Mainly, I was aware of how aware I was (meta-awareness?) about what these choices would communicate about me--my preferences, philosophies, and even my teaching style. My office is, as it turns out, a rhetorical device. This, I admit,  rather juvenile realization was re-enforced when a student came into my office for a conference, sat down on my hand-me-down love seat, looked around for a few seconds, and said, "I'm judging you by the things on your office." It is (and I told him so) appropriate for him to have done so. This is because my office communicates definite messages, some purposeful, some haphazard, about me as a teacher and as a person.

There are relatively obvious, and certainly purposeful messages being communicated through the things I've hung on the walls. I expected these things to be an expression of the way I see the world, the things I care about, and ultimately the ways that I wish to be viewed. These include Warhol themed nick-knacks like a calendar with a Warhol quote and Campbell's soup cans designed after the famous Warhol paintings (an interesting inversion in which the actual Campbell's soup brand drew inspiration from an artist who drew inspiration from their own graphic design). I added these art themed elements to go along with the one wall hanging in my office that I didn't go out and find, which was a poster print of a Kandinsky painting. I chose this poster out of a stack of things hanging around which had been abandoned by previous faculty. These things included a lot of classical themed stuff (Shakespeare stuff, mainly). I chose the Kandinsky piece because I prefer the modern over the classical, the pop over the cultured, the deconstructive over the refined. I added to these pieces a Dali style melting clock I bought at Hobby Lobby, so that my office is full of references to Modern art.

In addition to these, I hung a TOMS shoes flag (which the company smartly includes in the purchase of every pair, with a note encouraging buyers to take pictures with their flags in the exotic places where they where TOMS shoes. A bit of marketing brilliance). I also have a concert poster from a Cake concert, which is printed using vegetable based dyes on recycled paper, and which explicitly says so on the bottom of the poster, a Kurt Vonnegut themed piece of graphic art, and a poster sized copy of the mural at 826 Valencia, a youth literacy center in San Francisco. These all operate to give the office a sort of pseudo-hispster vibe which is in keeping with the way I see myself and wish to present myself--a hopefully unpretentious, socially aware hippy type guy, disguised in preppy clothes.

Of course, these things aren't very big and the office is actually, despite all these accoutrements, relatively sparse. I haven't changed the wall color, so the office is a drab, institutional off-white. The pictures on the wall are of relatively uniform size and are hung in a more or less straight line around the office, and I have, for a member of the English faculty, relatively few books on one rather cheap book shelf (which was already in the office when I moved in). I have only 45 of my own books in my office, all of them Comp/Rhet themed. This is compared to the many hundreds I have crowding our office at home. I also have a couple binders of research articles and some small books left on the shelf by a previous tenant. Though these decisions were not purposeful, they do communicate an understanding of my own position. I am contingent faculty, on contract for one semester at a time. Though the English department and I are happy with each other, and don't plan to break up any time soon, it is nevertheless possible that any one semester could be my last (especially since we keep getting our budget cut). And even if I remain on board, the university could hire a tenure track faculty member who needs the office, and so I could be shipped down the hall to share with another adjunct. So it would be rather presumptuous, and possibly a waste of time to pound too many holes in the walls or to haul too many books up the stairs. These decisions were not really purposeful, and so perhaps they're not strictly rhetorical, but there is a clear connection between these decisions and my own understanding of who I am. Thus, understanding my position provides a proper lens for understanding my decorating decisions.

This piece admittedly serves little particular purpose other than giving me something fun and interesting to think about. But it does provide an example that indeed there are many texts that can be analyzed outside of those we think of an technically and traditionally academic. Indeed, applying this type of analysis to other, larger forms of space commonly reveal important lessons about the politics of space, the symbology of urban/suburban design, and the assumptions that guide the way we live and move in our environments. These types of analysis, in short, teach us a great deal about ourselves.

Memoirs of Spruill, a Plagiarist

In my composition classes, my students just read their rhetoric's chapters on plagiarism and how to avoid it. Of course, because of my own ideological perspectives, I have wanted to subvert common-sense, naturalized views of plagiarism and copyright as moral/ethical issues. So, my students are also researching the history of copyright and blogging about their thoughts.

Teaching these chapters and thinking about the issues from the perspective of an academic interested in new literacies (where issues of what constitutes plagiarism and copyright infringement are considered problematic) has made me recall the one time in my life that I myself plagiarized. What follows is my own confession along with a self-analysis of why I plagiarized.

As a sophomore at Moore High School, I was assigned a term paper in my Biology class. The way the assignment worked was as follows: the teacher had a list of possible topics which students were to sign up for, so that there were never more than one person talking about the same topic (probably to combat plagiarism, since students couldn't copy off of other students). I was one of the last students to get a chance to sign up, so I got stuck with the topic of Prostatitis.

The night before the assignment was due, I realized that I hadn't done a bit of research or writing. So, I sat down with an old medical reference book that my mother had bought second hand when I was a baby and she wanted to stop calling the pediatrician for everything. I performed the classical plagiarist move of copying the book but changing words that I didn't know so that they didn't seem out of place.

I was (and still am) the kind of kid who was scared to death to do anything bad, because I was always convinced that I would get caught. So when I got the paper back with the comment, "you should write for medical journals," I just knew that the teacher knew and that his response was a subtle way of saying "I know where you got this." But he didn't, and I got an A, both on the paper and in the class.

Now, years later, I am a writing teacher. So it's valuable to look back at my own crime and analyze why I did it. After all, I was not a lazy student. I was a very good student, which is actually probably at least partially what allowed me to get away with it. So, why do good students plagiarize? Obviously, I do not claim that my experience is representative, but here is what led me to commit plagiarism:

1) The topic. I was a good student, who loved to read. But this topic was a total dud. By the time I was able to pick a topic, I could only pick a topic in which I was not at all interested and a topic that was actually kind of creepy (high school boys do not want to think about or talk about inflammation of the prostate). This problem led to problem two.

2) I waited too long. Only hours before I was to turn the paper in, I still had not started. Many teachers agree that it is often the good students who plagiarize. This is a product of last minute pressure by students who are afraid of failing an assignment that they waited until the last minute to begin. So there is pressure on good students to perform well. For this reason, a good student will not want to turn in aomw have baked crap. And, for me, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that the assignment was a dud. I am and was a meticulous student, but and I am and was also a bit ADD. So, the fact that the assignment was not the least bit interesting to me made it awfully easy for me to neglect.

So what, then, are the implications of my story? How do we see to it that our assignments discourage, rather than encourage plagiarism? To finish off here, I will address what we can do to write assignments that will help to our students avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

First, design assignment topics that tow the line between too open and too narrow. Allowing a students to simply write about anything may keep a student from straying beyond his comfort zone, and would make it easier for a student to hand in papers from the fraternity file. So an assignment should be specific enough and closed enough that the student must write his own material in order to fulfill the assignment.

But there must also be enough wiggle room in the assignment that the student does have at least some input into the topic. Freedom within boundaries is the goal. This allows the student to make the assignment her own in such a way that it will hold her interest, at least enough to get the assignment done.

Secondly, revision should be built into the assignment sequence. Though, by and large, we all except the importance of revision, a number of classes still do incorporate revision into the class. A teacher should be viewing, and commenting on multiple drafts of each paper. Doing so allows the teacher to watch the process of the student, which makes last minute plagiarism much more difficult. It also provides milestones for the student so that the student must work on the paper bit by bit, draft by draft. This negates the possibility that the student is waiting until the last second to begin a paper.

I don't intend to argue that these techniques will solve the plagiarism problem. Though these are cornerstones of the writing process in my classes, I still do face about one plagiarism case a semester. But these do a long way toward solving the problems that cause otherwise conscientious students to plagiarize.

The Right Hand is High School English; The Left Hand is College Composition

My freshmen often express disillusionment in their transition from high school English to college composition. Many of them feel (and I agree) that their high school English classes have left them unprepared for college writing in general, and my composition classes in particular. As a teacher, it is easy for me to suggest that such culture shock is a natural part of the learning process. As students advance both educationally and cognitively, it makes sense that the pedagogies upon which they once relied and within which they once thrived will seem inadequate. My students, on the other hand, have no such benign perspective. Many of them feel cheated or even led astray by high school teachers who would often justify hard or tedious assignments by claiming that they were "preparing them for college."

Thus, when my teaching points out the inadequacies of the five paragraph essay, or when I challenge often overly-pedantic views of first person writing and so on, my students respond bitterly about a secondary education that was supposed to "prepare them for college" but that has failed to do so. My students often hyperbolically express their desire to injure, maim, or kill their high school teachers for their false teaching. In fact, a student once told me that when he had gone home for a visit, he ran into his high school English teacher at Wal-Mart and he told her, right there in the store, that she owed him an apology.

On one hand, our students' feelings are natural to the educational experience and we need not worry about them; I remember having these same feelings as an undergraduate who had excelled in my high school English classes and had tested out of Composition I. But there is also a real and legitimate criticism couched in the responses of my students. At least from my perspective as a composition teacher, there is little curricular alignment between high school English programs and the college English departments their students are entering. There are, unfortunately, some unavoidable reasons for this.

Most high school English programs combine both the teaching of writing and of literature. And because most English teachers enter the field because of their love for literature, teaching about the history and interpretation of literature becomes the primary focus of the class. In fact, writing instruction in most high school English classes takes place while students are writing about the literary works they are reading. Thus, even in the English classroom, writing is treated as more of a skill set necessary for but peripheral to the real subject of the class. Writing is an activity that supports the teaching of literature, rather than being a subject of its own.

More significantly, though, is that high school and college teachers don’t seem to know what the other is actually doing. This should not be particularly surprising. Many high school teachers do not have the educational credentials and few have the time to teach as adjuncts in college composition programs. At the same time, only a few of the composition teachers I know have taught in secondary English programs. Though it’s an ever-present mantra in high school English classes to say that the class is “preparing students for college,” teachers of high school English know very little about what we actually do in the composition classroom.

To our shame, many first year writing programs have done little in the way of supporting secondary English programs. There are many researchers in the universities who are studying the writing habits, rhetorical prowess, and language usage of high school writers and proposing pedagogies based on their findings. But the lessons we are learning from this research seem too often to be getting lost in the ether. High school teachers aren’t reading our journals, and we’re not visiting their classrooms.

It is my admittedly un-researched argument here that there is a palpable disconnect between first-year composition programs and secondary English programs. It is also my assertion that this is a problem that we ought to work toward fixing. Without a doubt, true curriculum alignment will not be possible. The two enterprises are different enough to prevent this. Though high schools do indeed make it their goal to prepare students for higher education, they also have the burden of universal education. So it is also their goal to prepare students who will not and, perhaps, cannot go to college. Furthermore, high schools do not simply send students to the nearest state university, but instead send students to the four winds. Therefore, high schools cannot hope to account for the numerous pedagogical approaches at different institutions.

But even without some form of specific curriculum alignment, we can improve our teaching in both high school and college by fostering better communication between college English departments and high schools programs. We can help high school teachers better prepare their students for us by making clearer what we do, and what types of writing we privilege. We can also find ways to make sure that the research we do about their students gets back to them, so that the latest research a teacher has won’t be what they learned in their English education program while they themselves were in college. Furthermore, if we hate the five paragraph essay, we ought to be searching for and implementing new techniques to teach organization and invention. We are, after all, the research wing of the educational enterprise. And if teachers need these forms that we so hate because they work, it falls upon us to find something else that works and that isn’t antithetical to what we teach.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we are not involved in mutually exclusive projects, but rather we are indeed colleagues whose work can and should influence one another’s practices.