composition

The Pedagogical Practice I truly believe that, as an educator, I have a responsibility to break down the barrier that students believe exists between school and the "real world." I believe that educational settings should be microcosms of the world at large, a place where diversity exists, views clash, and there is the possibility for collaboration. In my particular case, most of the students who step into my writing classroom will never be English majors, and I don't want them to feel that writing is only something that is performed for an English teacher. I believe that breaking down this barrier not only enables students to see writing/learning as a social transaction/process, but hopefully removes some of the pressure that keeps students from writing, which I feel is especially derived from writing to the test. I also think it gives purpose to their writing, makes them more aware of the role they wish to play and the audience they wish to address in their writing, and...

Wallwisher actually ended up making its way into my classroom today. Students thought it was a cool tool. They were excited about using it, and one sutdent even asked if I would leave it up for them to see for years after they were done with the class. Today, I used it to segue into our final Writing as Activism project. I asked students to write stickies about all of the things they thought were going to be problems in the future. Many of them foresaw war, disease, obesity, and financial hardship in our future. Since they were all stuck in clusters, it was easy to see where ideas overlapped. The one problem that we did have was that with 23 people trying to access the same board at once, things were running slow. For many of my students, error messages bogged them down and left them unable to participate immediately, or at all. My students said that they are going to continue posting their ideas, as well as using Wallwisher in place of our Open Forum anonymous discussio...

So, I just stumbled upon Wallwisher  thanks to Twitter user,  TeachaKidd . What a neat program, and it's FREE! Wallwisher is something like Twitter combined with the look of computerized post-its or a digital scrapbook. You can add short messages and include links to audio, videos, and pictures. The text boxes stay where ever you click, so that you can layer them, move them into clusters, and see multiple messages all at the same time, unlike other programs, such as Twitter and Facebook, which push old text down the page and out of the way. I could see this being a useful tool to enhance class discussion. You could post something like "race" or "gender" and have students to do short free associations. You could create a wall of your students favorite links, books, music, etc. You could even just make small talk. I think there are endless very cool possibilities for this program. I'm going to give it a test run with my class this week, following TeachaKidd...

I'm still very curious as to why people feel so strongly about grammar. Not to say that grammar is useless or unimportant, but when the content is good, is it necessary to badger people that they have misapplied punctuation or used the wrong verb tense-- especially in Twitter tweets? Obviously, I'm opposed to badgering of any sort (not just about grammar), but should we be pointing out others' errors? Is it constructive? I tweeted the other day, "Why is grammar so important?" Here are a few of the responses I received: saradobie :  @ comPOSITIONblog  Correct grammar is what separates us from the animals. It also says a lot about who you are. And how much you read. JaykeisBrutal :  @ comPOSITIONblog  people don't always communicate effectively, should writing suffer just the same? Different medium require different rules . @ comPOSITIONblog  sentences need a form. Subject verb and adjective, at least in English. If the sentence doesn't have this it is incom...

So, I was debating spending a cool $200 on LiveScribe's Pulse SmartPen to bring to graduate school and my FYW composition class until a good friend recommended that I try Microsoft OneNote . That good friend deserves a huge hug because Microsoft OneNote is AWESOME! Microsoft OneNote allows you to create new notebooks, new pages, and new tabs, and chock them full of text, pictures, links, documents, etc. Now, instead of lugging around four different notebooks and textbooks, I have all of my notes neatly stored in OneNote (and my PDFs and eBooks on NOOKstudy). I never have to fumble through sheets of paper to find my class notes, and I can actually keep up with the rate of lecture speed. This is a screen shot of my class notes from one of my graduate courses: Click to see a larger view. As you can see, I was able to take notes, separate them into subjects, and even draw diagrams. What makes it different than writing in a notebook or typing them in a word processor is that OneNote ac...

Yesterday, in one of my graduate courses (Composition Theory and Teaching Writing),  we were talking about the work of Brodkey, Grimm, LeCourt, Port, Denny, and Villanueva. Some really interesting critiques/theories arose. For me, the most compelling idea-- given my interests in voice, authenticity, and grammar-- was the notion that one can only have a (writing) voice if she/he is close to the center/the norm.  As a middle-class, well-educated, white woman, I am very close to that norm, which means I have been granted access to my "voice," and I never considered that the language of education might deny others their own. I have since begun to understand that when students are far from that normative ideal, their voice is denied, labelled incorrect. Instead of embracing these different voices, education seeks to mold it into the language of the white middle class. Furthermore, in order to do this, students are forced to give up their accented language, which is ripe with ...

From RogerCreations , the creator of this video: Using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer, actor and allround know it all (I mean that in the best of ways) Stephen Fry I have created this kinetic typography animation. If you like what you hear you can download the rest of the audio file from Mr. Fry's website. stephenfry.com and then go to the audio and video section at the top of the page and look for the file entitled language. You can also find the file on iTunes by searching the name 'Stephen Fry's Podgrams'. I loved this particular essay on language and I thought it would be the prefect opportunity to make my first kinetic typography. I hope you like it and even if you dont I would like to heard what you think in the comments section. Also I know that at point the audio does not match the text so you doesnt have to write that. It is because I copied the transcript off of Stephen's website and it was not 100% exactly what he said and i did not notice until ...

In his book, Sustainability and Composition: Teaching for a Threatened Generation (2001) , Derek Owens writes about the absence of sustainability discourse in composition and writing studies classrooms (and in many other academic fields, as well). Composition courses often allow space for consciousness-raising; however, more of than not, the consciousness-raising pertains to what Owens calls "the triad of race/class/gender." Sustainability-- one of the biggest issues we face in the modern world-- is missing from the curriculum. I am often intimidated by notions of "green" or "ecofriendly" because as a middle class consumer, I feel hypocritical talking about "tree-hugger" issues, but Owens really puts the power for change in the hands of the teachers and students. He reminds us that to take some action is better than to take no action at all. Owens believes that the absence of sustainability, both in academia and the world at large, has the potent...

On Twitter, I've been following all sorts of writers and teachers, trying to see if these issues (of grammar, voice, authenticity, etc.) are coming up in the real world. Today, I saw a tweet that asked followers to check out a new blog post, " Are you a real writer? " on Corey Mandell: Professional Screenwriting Workshops.  The blog talks about advice from screenplay writers to novice writers. The big skills are apparently having a unique, original, authentic voice and telling a story no one's told before.  After reading theorists like Joseph Campbell , however, I'm not sure that such a thing exists. Everyone says, "you need to write original stories," but archetypal theory shows us that there are no original stories. We are simply repeating the same motifs over and over again. Even  Harry Potter is essentially a mix of Cinderella and the boarding school novel. So are there any original stories? How can we be original if we're really just pulling fro...

As a reader, I often look for work that gives off a unique voice. Good writers, I believe, have a fresh way of saying things, and from their work, you get the feeling that it is genuine and reflects their values. As a teacher, I find myself commenting on student work, "Great work! I can really hear the real so-and-so coming through." I hate it when students sound like they are writing solely to appease a professor. I like it when I see a spark of their personality come through on the page. The problem is that in this post-modern world, where we have begun to accept Cultural Relativisism as the basis for truth, is really possible for someone to have an "authentic voice" when it comes to writing? Since the role of the person is always changing in reaction to the forces around her/him (authority positions, venues, curent events, etc.), as are the writing situations (class, work, Facebook, etc.), is there really one unified voice, unified presence, or unified self that...

This is the kind of thing I do when I'm procrastinating real work on my day off... Follow comPOSITION on Twitter!

Watching late-night television, a certain ridiculous commercial caught my attention. The commercial itself was really mediocre advertising at best (I don't even remember the product it was promoting), but as someone interested in concepts of Englishes, grammars, signs and signifiers, and audiences, I couldn't help be struck by one simple word-- "gooder." Hearing that word, my head bobbed up from my laptop to catch the last 10 seconds of the clip. In the commercial, a woman named Jane and a female friend are talking about (I think) a weight loss product, which her friend says is "gooder." Jane's initial reaction is to say, "gooder isn't a word." Following shortly after Jane's remark, her friend notes enthusiastically, "Jane, you look gooder!" This time, Jane ignores the grammar trespass and agrees. Jane, of course, comes to accept "gooder" as a real word, when it conveniently describes her weight loss and makes it bet...

When people say "ignorance is bliss," they aren't kidding. Learning about language has totally ruined my life! Ok, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but really, taking Literary Theory and Composition Theory has completely changed my way of looking at the world. I can't do so much as go on Facebook without thinking about language and ideology-- which is how I was inspired to write this post. Today, I was struck by something I say all of the time. A friend wrote about girls who are "one of the guys" in her Facebook status, and I thought, "Well, hey, I'm 'one of the guys.'" For most of my life, at least up until my sophomore year of college, my closest friends were predominately male. When I was younger, I would climb trees with the boys, ride bikes with the boys, hike in the woods with the boys, and light things on fire with the boys. When I got older, I watched football with the guys, drank with the guys, watched action movie...

The scene where Red finds her song. Image from The Muppet Mindset blog. When I was younger, I really enjoyed watching The Muppets   and Fraggle Rock , which, as most of you know, are Jim Henson creations . Lately, I've been trying to rediscover what it is I loved so much about Jim Henson's work by watching clips of the muppets on YouTube and Season One of Fraggle Rock on Netflix. Now that I've been watching them, I'm amazed by how much you can actually learn from Fraggle Rock. Though it's a children's show, it addresses many hard-hitting issues, touching on racism, ethics, religion, community, class, gender, and even slavery. There is lots of writing that goes on in Fraggle Rock, as well. Uncle Traveling Matt leaves postcards about outer space (which is really our world) for the fraggles during every episode. Mokey keeps a journal that she writes in almost everyday. Doc, the human tinker, keeps a journal, too, about his ideas for future inventions. I didn't...

Composition, as a subject, seems powerful, though somewhat benign to many of us. What I mean by that is that we recognize writing's power to help students become self-aware and to help spark change, but we don't see how what we teach in our classrooms can also be hateful, hurtful, or ignorant. I am sparked to speak of this because of Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ), who took his life on September 22, just last week. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, and a female student, Molly Wei, taped two of Clementi's sexual encouters and broadcast them via the internet, exposing Clementi as a homosexual. Ashamed and troubled, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge. Sadly, Clementi's story is horrific, but not entirely unique. Kids are bullied everyday, and many teenage suicides are linked to histories of being bullied. 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of Massachusetts comes to mind here. Harassed, especially online, by two boys she had date...