Being Retired

Recently, someone in my former field interviewed me about being retired. I told her I preferred to think of myself as unemployed. After I quit my last academic position as a consequence of a contract dispute (message: read your contracts carefully), I tried for a few others, but no one wanted to hire me. 

That wasn’t a whine, just a statement that none of the four or five universities to which I applied made me an offer—although I got close with one. Admittedly, I was seriously circumscribing my possibilities by applying only for positions near either my son in Kansas City or daughter in Harrisonburg, VA. I have not been searching for a position because I need a job. I was looking because I like to teach and direct writing programs.

The field is competitive. There are all sorts of reasons why most universities would not want to hire me: I’m a bit of a contrarian. I think grades are idiotic; argument as a genre, overrated; and personal writing, underutilized.  Introductory writing courses at the university level can use writing as a way of having students engage in conversations with their classmates about issues that affect them, not us: like the pressure of exams; the gap between home and university life; what kind of professions and life styles they are imagining for themselves. It’s actually easy to imagine writing topics that young people would want to write about and share with each other as long as you don’t place them in pseudo writing situations over which hang the sword of grades. 

You can see why most universities might not want to hire me. I might be a bad teacher, but that’s simply not true. I’m a good teacher. When my students left my classes, most of them were more writers than when they came in. I began under the assumption that people like to write—until the desire gets schooled out of them. My job was to school that desire back in.

And I’m old, at least as far as the clock goes. That might not be the dominant reason that schools to which I have applied wanted to keep me at arm’s length. But I’ve wondered about the degree to which my age was working against me. I’m 74 and no one wants to hire a full professor and have him or her hang around for two years before vanishing to the Barbados. 

But I could teach until I die. Teaching is a wonderful profession. I can help any group of students discover more about themselves, their classmates, and their relationships to the world by writing. I have enjoyed teaching simply because I have helped bring writing into my students’ lives. I miss it.

Tilting against Grades

I feel as if I am tilting against windmills. It's a little late in life to be attacking these sort of things, but I can't stop. I didn't mean to get into a WPA-list conversation about grades again, but when a friend told me about Quinnipiac's first-year writing policy of no-grade/final portfolio, I wondered how many other schools had managed to reimagine education.

Here are the colleges that have responded to my question of whether they have a no-grade/pass-fail/final portfolio option: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Kingsborough CC, CUNY; New College of Florida; Evergreen College; University of Maine. 

The general response that I get when I suggest going to non-graded writing instruction is 1. we can't do it because the students are so grade conscious; 2. we are in an institution governed by grades; 3. students will slack off if we don't motivate them by grades.

I am not convinced by the argument that because everyone else is doing it, that’s what we have to do. For academics who prioritize critical thinking, I should think that argument would fall flat on its face. 

I think many teachers know: teachers like to respond to student writing if they are seriously responding, talking back to the students. This is writing as communication. But they do not like/even hate grading. That's why teachers procrastinate with that stack of papers.

Teachers know (and research is clear about this): students look at the grade. If it's an A, they'll read the comments; otherwise, they either ignore the comments or read them in order to fight back. These are not productive learning discussions.

Teachers complain about students who come to them and ask, but what can I do to get an A--the what-do-you-want syndrome. Like who's at fault here?

And finally, we have the argument about motivation--that if we don't motivate them by grades (presumably with high standards, leading to raising-the-bar rhetoric), they won't work on their writing. 

Left out of the grade-motivation argument is how are we teaching writing? Let me assume (and my experience and research confirms this) that most students really like to write--and they want to improve their writing. But some of the ways in which we try to teach writing (the we-know-what’s-good-for-you-strategy); well, if I were a student in a pass/fail course, I would also try to skate as close to the nether edge as I could (a response to Ed's and Val's post). Some of the stuff we try to teach students is pure junk and they know it.

Our research at Drexel is very clear: half of the students enter our first-year classes disliking, sometimes hating writing. Nearly all of them began pre-school and kindergarten enjoying scribbling/writing. As teachers, we have killed that pleasure in writing--the early death usually beginning around 5th grade often in the form of the five-paragraph essay. Our challenge is to bring back their early pleasure in writing. If you're not doing that, what are you doing? 

Anyone interested in this conversation should consider Tagg’s (the learning paradigm) distinction between surface and deep learning, intrinsic or extrinsic motivation or perhaps view Ken Robinson’s TED talk on creativity. Also Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds—which might explain our profession’s inability to unhook itself from grades, even though some teachers know the pleasure of responding to student writing without reducing their responses to a GRADE.

Grades Suck

I'm keeping the syllabus conversation going. Below is an edited response to Bill Thelin, one of my good friends, who spends, I think, a fair amount of time negotiating a syllabus with his students. He cited Ira Shor's practice of negotiating a syllabus, described in When Students Have Power and Empowering Education. I think Bill also gives more importance to grades than I do. I think grades suck.

======

 To Bill: If one demotes the function of the syllabus, then we don’t have to waste a lot of time on it. The syllabus, to my mind, is mostly a bureaucratic invention, serving more as a document to circulate outside the classroom. If one takes up seriously (and this Ira did—and to me, that was his main point; which was also Freire’s point) learning as collaboration rather then delivery (deconstructing, as F put it, the student/teacher dichotomy), then we don’t have to spend a lot of time negotiating a bureaucratic construction. Rather, we’re here to work on our writing; let’s go. 

I think the teacher also has to let the students know how the course will be run, the primary goals, and the kind of projects the teacher and students will be doing. The teacher also has to find ways of getting useful feedback from students and know how to adjust in light of that feedback. Ira used the after-class-group; I use a class journal. 

I think objectifying the institutional imperatives could be useful. But we should also note that in many ways, those imperatives are elastic and often disposable. We make our own choices as teachers about which ones we’ll follow (and the degree to which we want to bend our principles in order to have a job). 

We will disagree on grades: no, we don’t need them. They are silly. I don’t need them. The students don’t need them (I recognize the imperialism in that claim—let’s say they have been taught to need them, but most of them seem to know better). The bureaucracy needs them because they think they need them as a consequence of a structural inadequacy. 

Within this discussion, let me highly recommend 

Schmidt, J. (2001). Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives. New York: Rowan and Littlefield.

I think anyone in the field of education should read Schmidt’s book. I think Schmidt would interpret grades as a way of inducing stress and maintaining control. You have to maintain control when you have adopted an adversarial rather than a collaborative stance.

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

DeCentering Writing Studies

I have finished taking notes on Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion. Her book was well worth my reading. I appreciated most of what she wrote. And in those places where I had to acknowledge different universes, she brought up points for discussion.

Her important point to me involves the materiality of emotion: that we see emotion and we read emotion in texts—again, understanding texts as only superficially static. When we read emotions in texts, we are obviously reading ourselves, our histories, out cultures, our relationships with others, our friends we have loved, those who have died, those who have faded from our lives but left in our minds their traces.

Micciche makes a convincing argument to the necessity of paying attention to the materiality of emotion through language. Her larger point contests the debilitating dichotomy between emotion and reason—as if they could ever be separated by a theoretical centrifuge.

I believe with Micciche that when students are emotionally invested in whatever they write, they will write better than when defending some kind of canned topic. Not only will they write better, they will learn more about writing by having been engaged in the writing act.

Although Micciche links Marx’s theory of alienated labor to her overly-labored argument positioning composition and writing program administration as subjugated and feminized, I might turn it against what I have previously called performative, fake, or school writing—when we ask students to write essays demonstrating their competence or knowledge in order to achieve an external reward—a grade (see Daniel Pink’s TED talk on extrinsic vs intrinsic rewards). Reframed, we can see this kind of writing as alienated labor, labor that is “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself . . . mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” This frame of school-writing might help to explain the marked difference between the kind of writing we get when we ask for honest or bogus information.

I appreciate the general thrust of Micciche’s argument, but I have to wonder about the space between what she and I see or whether one or both of us are blind. I wrote in a previous post that I have never “felt” the subjugation of writing studies or writing program administration—and I have often wondered about the disenfranchised claims—which Micciche extensively documents. I don’t have space to disentangle our differences here. I have always felt respected within the academic environment—and I think many of my WPA friends  have felt the same. I think some of this difference might be located in social class relationships—I don’t know. I do know that as a Writing Program Administrator, as a Professor, I have occupied an incredibly privileged social position. And I know that as a WPA, one of my dominant projects is to abdicate disenfranchised academic labor.  There is absolutely no logic that supports requiring writing courses taught by part-time teachers (other than the logic of profit).

Micciche argues extensively that Writing Studies suffers from its link to materialism, caring, affect. I think as a field we may have overly disenfranchised ourselves. I have seen a long history of rhetoric and composition scholars (note the way in which we have linked composition to “rhetoric”) attempting to argue for the centrality of our field. To me, these arguments have seemed silly. I think it’s equally important for citizens to be able to name in distant order the planets in our solar system as to be able to define ethos, logos, and pathos. I think as scholars we need to pay some attention to how our arguments make ourselves the center of the intellectual universe.  I love to write. If I can pass that on, that seems good enough. I’m not certain that this love should be required.

Rethinking Objectives

Two things of interest this morning: First is that I find it easier to write in here (i mean in this blog space) than I do in word, like in my diary, where I usually write something that I might paste somewhere in a more public forum.  I have no idea why this is so.

Second: I'm going to write something in here about personal writing and teaching every MWF (days when I'm not teaching)--and possibly SatSun, the days of reduced pressure.  This is a way of accumulating my thoughts about the subject, some of which will reappear in different forms when I write for publication.

I feel wonderful this morning for reasons I can't explain. It's a lovely day and I enjoyed yesterday with my students and reading their work.  There is of course more to feeling wonderful than that. But when we feel wonderful, we should in some way mark it down so that on other more gruesome days, we can go back and say--there, it was like that, and I will feel that again.

I am thinking a lot about the kind of writing my students are doing and how this kind of writing might or should fit into an undergraduate curriculum and even in required writing programs.  I think I"m going to stick with only one thought this morning--the degree to which we have skated over our students' (dis)affection for writing--and whether we should elevate affect in our objectives--like consider affect as a separate outcome in the WPA Writing Outcomes. I don't think in all of our discussions in the 90s that affect even came up as a topic. Others can correct me here.

The real issue is the degree to which we backpedal a bit on our focus of preparing our students for the writing situations they are likely to meet in other undergraduate courses, one of the two most often cited objectives in our required writing programs--the other being critical citizenship.  Most of us probably recognize that the Service/CC objectives frequently alienate students from the writing habit that as writers we claim to cherish.

If you've read this far, I encourage you to read some of the autobiographies, reflections, and essays on vulnerability students in my Life Writing class have written.

Links:  Life Writing Essays

#personalwriting2.blogspotcom #ipeckham #personalwriting #firstyearwriting #studentwriting

An Andean Flute

I have had a few difficult experiences in the past several days, not the least of which has been my ill-advised zinger on plagiarism on the WPA-l.  These experiences have been difficult to internalize, resort and rearrange so that I could come out on the other side, having learned something that would help me make more sense out of my life and the lives of those with whom I intersect.

Being the kind of writer I am, I make better sense out of events by writing about them.  Whether I let anyone see the process is in many ways the subject of this blog. I began this blog simply because I was asking my students to create blogs.  When I began, I was decidedly blog innocent.  I still am significantly innocent, but through the process of writing these posts, I have learned a good deal about writing, private and public discourse and the many areas in between, and I want to try to get down this morning something of what I am learning.  One would think I would have learned more, having been teaching and writing for more years than I care to mention, but people who know me well know I'm a slow learner. My wife, Sarah, used to console me by saying at least I learn.

I ask my Life Writing students to write personal essays that they are willing to let the other nine students in the class to read.  Some of these students have been willing to edit their essays and allow me to post links to them on this blog.  Needless to say, this kind of exercise is a natural reader-oriented activity, quite a bit better than "Imagine you are writing a letter to . . . ."

I have imagined my blogging as something of the same, although exaggerated by the number of unknown readers as a consequence of my attempt to gain some kind of readership by announcing on WPA-l and with Google+.  For several reasons, I wanted to engage in the same kind of writing I have been asking my students to do.  First, I like this kind of writing--it's how I figure myself out.  Well, I'll stop there. It's dangerous to try to figure yourself out in a public space. I did know it was dangerous, but I know I'm trying to discover for myself something about writing and being somewhere on the continuum from diary (absolutely private) to published book--large, unknown audience (this is all Moffett stuff).

Truthfully, I like the risk. I can't explain why, but I do. Actually, I do know why, now that I've thought about it, but I'm not going to explain it. Key is resistance to a kind of enforced sterility that characterizes most professional writing. I'm not all the much different than one of my students I quoted in my last post.

But I have gotten into trouble, and now I'm trying to work my way out of it.

About fifteen years ago, I published in an online journal an article documenting/interpreting the origins of the Conference on the Theatre and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (PTO), featuring the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire.  I was one of the original organizers in about 1994 or so (it is still ongoing--this year's will be in Omaha, NE, the place of its origin.  In the article, I recounted several very difficult moments in the conference. I had occasion to reread this essay yesterday and I thought I would include here a couple of paragraphs near the end of the essay when I wrote about my decision to make public some of the problems that might have perhaps been left private, reminding me of one of my previous posts in which I wrote about crossing the line [the essay was called "The Flute"].
---------------------------

After multiple identity conflicts and role juggling, the advisory committee [I was a member] reconstructed itself and moved forward.  I would like to expose these conflicts because they reveal the underbelly of social relationships and the liberatory movement, but in any movement, as in any relationship, there are things one shouldn’t talk about because the public right to know conflicts with the individual’s right to privacy (a statement that is itself conflicted by the linguistic social construction of  “individual” and “public”).  There is a point at which one glosses over discomforting issues and gets on with the business of living.  Where we place that point defines us—as I have defined myself by telling you this story.

I know that in order to hear Paulo’s music through the cacophony, one has to see beyond; one has to focus not on individuals, not on class, race, or gender but on the contradictions within the system—and on the possibilities for action.  That’s what Paulo means by conscientizaçao.  I think that we also have to move beyond blame.  We have to stop blaming others and we have to stop blaming ourselves.  But it’s hard to remember that amidst the finger-pointing and shouting.

-------------------------------

Self-Indulgence

I'm becoming more comfortable with simply writing something down here and in an uncritical moment, clicking on publish--of course I can think later and come back to delete a post, but if I've left it up for an hour or so, it may already have done its damage.  After a couple of conversations with forgiving friends who have been reading some of these posts, I have had to think about the self-indulgent character of blog writing, or at least my blog writing.

Carra stepped out a bit farther on the limb and noted that a good deal of my writing seemed self-indulgent--and I realize that right now, I am proving her point, writing about the writing life--as I see it.  I want in this post to reflect (there it is again) on two characteristics of personal writing and the kinds of writing my students do, particularly in Life Writing.  I think I first want to talk about my/our sense of readers, the readers in our heads and the readers who most definitely are not in our heads but who nevertheless stumble across our words and on occasion get back at us, letting us know they were, in fact, there.

When I'm writing in this blog, I have a sense of some of the people who might read these posts: several of my students because I usually let them know when I've made an entry (let's call this the rhetoric of enactment); many of my WPA friends, some of whom know what I went through two years ago (there's the self-indulgence in spades again); and some of my Facebook and Google+ friends, because I'm trying to promote this blog in both these venues (I'm going to try Twitter next).  And then there are some people who stumble across these posts and read them in any number of surprising ways, ways I could never have anticipated.

In our field, we generally emphasize to our students audience awareness--an emphasis Peter Elbow has at least partially challenged, noting that at times we need to be able to write without a sense of audience on our backs.  As a writing teacher, I have generally gone along with the audience-awareness trope, but my recent experiences have, at the least, complicated my sense of audience.  I know that when I am writing here, I am mostly trying to get down some thoughts about an issue, almost as if I were writing in my diary.  Getting the thoughts down is my priority--knowing I can always go back and get rid of deadwood and really stupid thoughts (assuming i can spot them).  But while I'm writing, I have a vague sense of some of my close friends who I think will be reading this--but it's as if I'm talking to them.  And then in the distant corners of my mind are memories of negative responses I've received about my writing over the years and a couple of negative responses to this blog.

To a certain extent, all the people who have responded to our writing/being in one way or another are on our backs as we write. I think the degree to which we can shake them off is some measure of our writerly self-indulgence.  And personally, I can say (Peter's point), the more I can shake this audience-burden, the more I enjoy writing.  I know that at times, I have to pay attention to audience (I'm trying to rewrite an article on the ecology of assessment right now--well, it's what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm writing this instead, writing my way, if you will, into work).

I think I've worn this topic out.  I want to move from readers & self-indulgence to vulnerability and what my students are writing (and maybe, self-authored revision).  I'm going to try to make this quick; actually, the moves are obvious.  When writers self-indulge, they open themselves up.  And when we open ourselves up, we of course risk a lot, but we also open the door to other people, kind of like asking others into the party.  Some people are not going to have a good time, won't like the pictures on the wall and so on, but others will feel more or less at home.

That's not a very good metaphor--so let me try it this way.  In my Life Writing class, my students have really opened themselves up to each other.  Maybe rather than let people in, they have let themselves out--walked into the street and found a lot of other people like them, with the same problems, the same hurts, the same desires, the same fears.  Their words have helped them get out of their culturally imposed prisons (you are not supposed to go naked in public).  When my students discover commonality through their writing and when they write back to each other about these hurts and desires that we are taught we should keep under wraps, they discover writing.  It's not too hard to theorize how one can move from the self outward in this kind of writing (Chapter Two in Teaching the Universe of Discourse), but this post is already overly-long, and I really do need to be working on that article.

But a final word on revision.  You will see when my students give me all the links to their reflections on writing and vulnerability (you can see some of them by clicking on the Life Writing Autobiography page above) how they are paying attention to audience (the class as an audience and readers of this blog as a potential audience [and to a certain extent, me as an audience]) and both writing and revising with these different rhetorical situations fully in mind.  In my last class, to a person, they all said about my linking to their vulnerability essays, they wanted to look them over again first.

Ok--to the article.

#personalwriting2.blogspot.com #personal writing #writing #writing for fun #vulnerability #Irvin Peckham #Peter Elbow #audience #self-indulgent writing

The Space of Writing

Now this is interesting--to me at least: I just want to write a short blog entry today--nothing serious, and I found myself preferring to write in the blog space rather than in Word and subsequently cutting and pasting into the blog.  The choice has something to do with formality, revision, and spontaneity, and it taken far enough might have something to do with authenticity and personal writing.

In my Life Writing class, we always begin with about ten-fifteen minutes of writing in our personal diaries (I think I've said this in a previous posting).  We turn the lights down a bit and listen to music, like Gil Evans, while writing.  It's a quiet, lovely time, ten students (yes, small class) and me, going into our heads and writing about ourselves and our lives to ourselves, just figuring things out.

I had a lesson plan yesterday that quickly went awry.  The student who was supposed to give us our daily grammar lesson was missing, so we skipped that.  I had planned on having the students who hadn't yet posted their vulnerability essays upload them into the forum where we read one another's essays and then move on to our next personal essay--a good one that one of the students suggested (here it is, word for word as she suggested it:

Coming to terms with "reality". Eventually there comes a times when we realize that wanting to be the next Bill Gates or The president of United States takes a whole lot more than just saying so. How has the shock changed your perception on life as you've gotten older? Have there been any situations/life events that may have altered your "reality"? -The Success and/or Failure of relationships (love and/or platonic) & the lessons taken from them.)

Well, three or four students wanted to make a few more changes on their essays before they posted them, and none of us had finished reading all the new ones that had been posted, so some of us started reading and writing back to the newly posted essays while the others kept working on theirs.  Lights still low.  All of us reading on our laptops.  Gil Evans.

I finished reading and responding to two of them & looked up (we're all in a circle); everyone still reading and writing; period half over.  I mean seriously reading and writing.  I mentioned something about my plan to move to Sha'Myra's topic.  Everyone liked it, but they were busy reading and writing; they wanted to read what everyone had written, and that's what we did for the rest of the period--until the time came for our class journal--a place where I usually have them comment on what we did for the day, how the class is going, and where they would like it to go.

We usually have some very interesting discussions about writing and who we are and writing about who we are for some of the class period, but we didn't yesterday.  it was just into our laptops (even for the one student who RADICALLY prefers to write with a pen and read hard copy), Gil Evans playing.

I guess I'll just leave this entry here.  But not quite.  Their vulnerability essays are really interesting to read.   I hope they'll let me post links to them on this blog.  I'm really finding out what students can do when the teacher just basically gives them a space in which they explore with each other (and with me) their writing and who they are--with a little bit of organizing on my part.

These students are mostly juniors and seniors who signed up for this odd course because they like to write (not all of them are English majors).  I have my 7:30 morning English 2000 class with whom I am not terribly satisfied.  This is a required writing class.  I have about 12 out of 22 students who are there every day.  They are thoughtful students who are enjoying the freedom to write.  I have three or four more who get there most of the time.  And the rest, some of the time.  I'm thinking a lot about this class and the possible role of the professor.  And about grades.  And "rigor," tough-love kind of stuff.  And--I can't quite put my finger on it--but the relationship between my blaming some of them for being who they are as a way of avoiding blaming me for being who I am and that space between where no one is to blame for occupying the space s/he does in a cultural system into s/he was born.