defining rhetoric February 5, 2010
Posted by KC in academia, teaching.Tags: colloquium, Lunsford, new literacies, rhetoric, Stanford
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Andrea Lunsford gave a terrific talk on our campus last night as part of our English Composition Colloquium Series. I knew ahead of time that she was going to talk specifically about the Stanford Study of Writing, with an explicit connection to new literacies. At the heart of the talk were the stories of three undergrad students who were doing all sorts of interesting composing in extracurricular contexts, but whose feelings of connection to school writing were much more tenuous.
What I didn’t know was that she was going to frame her talk in terms of rhetoric. She gave a nice overview of rhetorical theory, but I’ve gotten a couple of questions from folks who were there about how our field defines rhetoric. That’s a big question, but I thought I’d post here some slides that I used in last semester’s seminar on rhetoric. (And yes, that’s bacon on the slide with the Sir Francis Bacon quote.)
the kindle, ipad, and e-reading January 28, 2010
Posted by KC in grading, life, technology.1 comment so far
Unless you spent yesterday under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Apple’s new iProduct, the iPad. In fact, at least one of the resident cranks over at Slate thought that maybe Obama had made a bad decision to give the State of the Union on the same day as Steve Job’s product announcement. Even Obama couldn’t compete.
It had also been pretty clear that Apple either had to announce some kind of tablet, or it was going to let everyone down — similar to our collective dissatisfaction over the flying cars and jet packs we were promised.
It’s clear that the iPad is being positioned as an e-reader, and Apple is even adding an online bookstore to iTunes. I don’t know much about the details yet, but my first reaction to this news was a slight twinge of buyer’s remorse. You see, I got a Kindle for my birthday last week, and I worried that maybe I’d bought too soon. (more…)
lunsford colloquium at sf state January 15, 2010
Posted by KC in academia, education, teaching, technology, writing.1 comment so far
Andrea Lunsford will be giving a talk on my campus in a couple of weeks on “Student Writing and the New Literacies.” She’ll basically be using results from the Stanford Study of Writing to discuss how the writing practices of college students is being shaped by new technologies. If you’d like more information, check out the snazzy flier I put together:
phds teaching community college? January 13, 2010
Posted by KC in academia, education, teaching.add a comment
I’ve got mixed feelings about Tom Hurley’s article in today’s IHE suggesting that recent English PhDs ought to seek teaching jobs at community colleges. On the one hand, he’s got a point: the job market for English PhDs is terrible, and only likely to get worse. On its surface, Hurley’s point seems to be that “teaching at community college ain’t that bad, really” along with a more submerged thesis: “look, you’re not going to get that job at a doctoral intensive university, so you need to lower your expectations.”
I don’t dispute either of these claims, but because I teach in the Composition MA program at San Francisco State, where our primary mission is to prepare our MA students to teach specifically at community colleges, I see some potential problems with the notion that we ought to be flooding community college departments with newly-minted English PhDs. (more…)
notes on dj-ing 80s music October 12, 2009
Posted by KC in life.1 comment so far
This last weekend I went to my 20-year high school reunion. That means (for those of you who’d prefer not to do math) that my classmates and I were in high school during the mid- to late-80s, which we all know was the Golden Age of American Pop Music.*
Unfortunately, the DJ who was hired to do music for the reunion seemed not to fully appreciate this fact, and, frankly, he did a terrible job. Presented with the opportunity to explore the nuances and surprises of the GAAPM, he instead spent the evening scraping the bottom of the 80s barrel, serving up such dregs as Tiffany’s mall-rat anthem, “I Think We’re Alone Now,” and even some Milli Vanilli. Seriously. As he launched into each poorly-considered song, people who hadn’t seen each other in 20 years turned to each other and shrugged quizzically, eyebrows set in a “WTF?” arch. Several members of the reunion committee were seen cornering the DJ and wagging their fingers at him. Dancing was more sporadic and less exuberant than one would expect of a room full of drunk 38-year-olds.
another response to stanley fish September 9, 2009
Posted by KC in academia, teaching, writing.2 comments
Fish is at it again, in a third installment of his “What Colleges Should Teach” series. And here is another response:
Once again, Dr. Fish, you ignore the fact that writing — real writing — is always writing *for* and writing *about*. I agreed with your first post’s implication that college writing courses often focus too much on “content”, in the form of literature, or cultural studies, or whatever. I also agree that there were certain excesses associated with the whole “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language” thing, although I would point out that learning a “new language” isn’t a value-neutral exercise. Teaching students to write academically changes them in profound ways.
But I have trouble believing that what you describe here is actually all you do in your writing courses, nor do I believe that if that’s the case, your students are learning anything worthwhile. You have described a setting in which students have no motivation to write, no content to wrestle with, and no audience to persuade or enlighten. You seem to assume that students must first work on *how* to write something, before they can move on to the *what* and *why*. In other words, you have reduced the entire rhetorical situation to stylistic exercises.
I suspect that much of your posturing here is the result of a self-manufactured literacy crisis. That is, I think you have become appalled by what you consider to be student writing that lacks the stylistic niceties you associate with good prose, and you’ve decided that it’s the job of college writing courses to fix the problem. I’m sorry that I can’t oblige you. I’m too busy trying to give my students reasons to write and guiding them toward more and more academic ways of framing their ideas in writing. If you’ll forgive the expression, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
response to stanley fish September 2, 2009
Posted by KC in academia, education, teaching, writing.add a comment
The following is a comment I made on Stanley Fish’s recent New York Times blog posts, which can be found here and here. This won’t make much sense if you haven’t read both his posts first.
Okay, here’s my exercise, Dr. Fish: Neither this sentence nor the next one will be particularly meaningful, because they aren’t situated in any kind of context. See?
But seriously, I thank you for clarifying (or perhaps backpedaling on) your position. I agreed with one of the premises of the first post, which was that writing courses ought not be literature or cultural studies courses in disguise, with a thin veneer of writing instruction layered over the top. I, too, have seen too many courses like that, and I think it comes from the fact that many composition instructors are/were literature grad students who didn’t find jobs teaching literature, so they use comp. courses as a surrogate. I think this does a disservice to students. Actual writing instruction is a good thing.
However, I’m not sure I agree with you about what actual writing instruction involves. Your neither/nor exercise gets at style, but does little in terms of other canons of rhetoric, like invention or arrangement. Students cannot practice discovering the available means of persuasion if they don’t a) have some topic they are treating (we might call this “content”) or b) have some audience they are aiming to persuade. Learning how to write shouldn’t be disconnected from having something to say.
I teach freshman composition as a course in ethnographic writing, not because I think learning how to do fieldwork is all that important (although observing and interviewing are useful skills), but because it provides a definable context for learning how to describe and analyze cultural behaviors and artifacts. That is, it gives students a motive to write. Even a literature-based composition course could use a poem or a novel as an occasion to write. I think it is not a question of either/or — either content or form, literature (or cultural studies) or writing. Instead, it is a matter of foregrounding the appropriate activities, which in the case of a composition course would be the writing.
random responses to student evals August 26, 2009
Posted by KC in teaching.1 comment so far
I often find student course evaluations kind of frustrating, partly because there’s really no way to respond, even to the positive ones. So, out of that frustration, I offer the following responses to some of the comments from the three courses I taught last semester (you’ll have to infer the comments from the responses):
- I’m glad you feel that your writing improved. I think everyone’s writing (almost) always improves in a comp course, but students don’t always recognize the fact.
- Lots of other students say that they find the group work really useful, and I’ve got sound pedagogical reasons for doing them. I’ll try to explain this better next time, but I suspect that some of you just don’t like to play with others.
- Me? Organized? I’m glad you thought so.
- I would rather not have done the once-a-week, three-hour format for our literature class, either. I didn’t have any control over the time the course was offered.
- It’s graduate school; it’s supposed to be challenging.
- You’re right — I should put those due dates on the syllabus next time. Thanks for suggesting it.
- Really? You think you got absolutely nothing from this class? I doubt it, but if that’s true, surely you bear some of the blame for that.
- Yes, Middle English is sexy.
- There is more to becoming a composition teacher than writing syllabi and lesson plans. An effective teacher knows how to engage with the research and scholarship of the field. We did the research paper to help you do that.
- I’m flattered, really, but I’m taken.
sparkling wine country July 27, 2009
Posted by KC in food, life.add a comment
We just got back from a weekend trip to Napa Valley during which we took Sunset Magazine’s advice and chose activities that followed a “sparkling wine” theme. That basically means we went to wineries that specialized in the méthode Champenoise, in order to compare different sparkling wines, and hopefully get a better sense of what we like (upshot: we like sparklers made from pinot noir more than chardonnay).
If you’re considering doing something similar, here are a few notes from our trip:
- Mumm Napa: In addition to having a free tour, this winery has a great indoor/outdoor tasting patio where you can order of flight of three or four 3-oz. pours of wine (we did a flight of bruts and a flight of their Devaux line). The view west across the valley is magnificent. Also, there’s an art gallery with both a rotating exhibit and a more permanent Ansel Adams exhibit. It’s a good place to hang out while you’re sobering up from the tasting.
- étoile: This is a restaurant located in the Domaine Chandon winery. Their menu is built to bring out the best in the paired wines, which is the reverse of what usually happens. We did the four-course tasting menu with wines paired with each course (except for the last dessert course). Some of the pairings, like an unfiltered Newton chardonnay with an earthy truffle papardelle, were inspired. We also got to try some of Chandon’s less-available sparklers. This is a great restaurant if you want to foreground the wines.
- Schramsberg: This somewhat smaller winery combines a tour of their wine caves with an above-ground tasting of four of their sparkling wines. The gothic caves are both literally and figuratively cool, and our knowledgeable guide did a terrific job talking us through the various tastings at the end — much better than the typical pay-and-pour tasting experience.
- Candlelight Inn: OK, this doesn’t have much to do with sparkling wine, but this is the bed-and-breakfast where we stayed. We were fortunate enough to upgrade to their detached cottage, where we had breakfast brought to our private balcony. Also, the decor is somewhat less Victorian than many B&Bs in the area (a definite plus for me).
- Bouchon bakery, next to Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Yountville, turns out to be a great place to grab a quick lunch.
I’d recommend any of the things we did. My strongest recommendation for wine country, though, would be to pick a theme around which to build your own visit. Sparkling wine worked out really well for us, but next time we might decide to focus on wines made from a particular grape (pinot noir, maybe?) or maybe dessert wines. I think having a trip theme helped us get a bit off the beaten path.
