composition

It frustrates me IMMENSELY when students-- or anyone for that matter-- tell me, "Oh, I don't know what that word meant," "I didn't know how to cite that in MLA style" (especially after we've gone over it in class and shared multiple resources detailing how to), "I didn't know who so-and-so was," or "I didn't know that [insert major current event] was happening." There are some things that are tough to come by, but definitions, citation guides, biographies, and major world events are not any of them.  If my rabbit can figure out how to open up Google, so can you! Cluck hopped around on the keyboard and managed to open up Google without my assistance. Like I said, some things aren't easy to find (for instance, a free live stream of the Super Bowl), but many times people are simply lazy. Today, we have the biggest library in the world at our fingertips, the Internet, but people don't want to spend an extra 15 minutes look...

About a week ago, I picked up Stanley Fish's Save the World on Your Own Time. A colleague mentioned it during a conversation at faculty orientation, and I was instantly intrigued. Fish argues that teachers who try to do anything but teach-- which he defines as providing new discipline-relevant material and demonstrating practical methods of analysis and evaluation-- are doing their students and academia in general a disservice. His argument also extends to administrators and universities in general. And he doesn't sugar coat it. He has a wry, sarcastic, and very direct style to his writing; some might even call it aggressive (he does). As a teacher, I was interested in his distinction between "academicizing" and indoctrinating, especially after hearing a fellow classmate's heated objections to a teacher who was offering extra credit to students who chose to join Occupy Wall Street. To me, that was simply unacceptable. I also remembered the 2008 election and my tea...

For several months now, I've been slowly working through an archive of First Year Writing students' portfolios. Though I'm reading them through a lens that looks for classifications of public versus private writing spaces, I saw something today that sparked my interest much more. I was reading a student's essay on dorm living that was written for a colleague's class when I came across a description of a student that I recognized, one of my own. It was a strange moment for me. I only had the girl in class for a few weeks, but she was very unique. She had a creative approach to writing and a great sense of voice. I knew it would be a pleasure to read her papers and to push her to improve her writing throughout the semester, but I never got the chance. Eventually, she just stopped showing up. What I learned from this other students' paper was a bit about the girl's lifestyle. It made it seems as if she were a recluse, someone who never stayed in the dorms unles...

This is not the first semester that I taught Jonathan's Swift's "A Modest Proposal." It is a piece I thoroughly enjoy giving to students. They are horrified and shocked by the nonchalant way that Swift goes about calling for the killing and eating of babies. Sometimes, they are uncertain as to whether or not Swift is making a legitimate proposal. Not everyone realizes it is satire from the get-go. Students don't usually get a chance to interact with satire in academia. Everything here is so serious. The one piece of satire my students recalled having read is Animal Farm, which is far less humorous than Swift's piece. My students had a great discussion about the piece, though. They laid out what made the piece effective or ineffective, found passages, and used history to think about the piece. Without being prompted, discussion about activism emerged, as well as commentary on the rhetorical triangle. I was impressed.  And, as we figured out, satire is all aroun...