When reading course evaluations I often spot comments about how much students enjoyed debates in class.  I know that class debates are a common activity for my teachers.  These debates force students to engage the text and engage as well in a kind of rhetorical flexibility by being able to take either (or both) sides of an issue within an essay.  Nevertheless I personally don’t find them useful in my teaching. That’s an odd statement from a person who spent most of high school on the debate team, perhaps.  But it may be that very experience that colors my sense of this class activity so. My objection centers on the tendency of debates to become black and white, for and against, pro and con, right and wrong.  It’s not polarization itself that bothers me (though yeah I don’t think that’s generally speaking a good idea); rather it’s that this mode of discourse seems to blunt critical thinking by reducing complexity.  To put it another way, I find debates tend to promote black and white while for me all the good stuff is gray. Now many of the teachers in our program get towards this by having students switch sides and I am sure that they find a way to make it work in their classrooms.  But for me, putting the black next to the white doesn’t make the gray.  Instead, the gray comes from continually looking at the things students don’t want to see: the places in the text that don’t make sense, that complicate their own thinking, that work against everything they want to say.  Looking at these places doesn’t mean dismissing them.  It means working through them to end up with a stronger sense of what you want to say in response and relation to the text. Debates might get there for many, but not for me.  I’ll stay gray.   ... View more

At my school we call them the SPOT forms: Student Perception Of Teaching.  But no matter the acronym, the existence of the course evaluation is nearly universal. I’ve just finished reviewing the fall SPOTs for all of our teachers.  There’s a lot of discussion in my department about course evaluations in general and more specifically about how accurately they reflect the quality of teaching.  Since I look through the SPOTs for all of our writing courses every semester, I have a certain view from above that influences my own thoughts on the process.  Say what you will, course evaluations reflect very specific patterns in ways that are quite useful. For example, there is one set of very regular patterns that emerge (and have emerged for as long as I have worked in writing program administration).  Certain comments appear with utter regularity: this course could be improved by writing less, having more time between papers, reading more interesting essays, doing less group work, skipping peer revision—in short students would improve the course by taking away the elements that, we feel, make it most successful.  And I’ve found this specific set of comments at every school I’ve worked out; it seems less bound by institution and more somehow part of the fabric of the writing course. Of course there are high points too.  Students raving about their teachers and talking about the changes they’ve experienced as writers and thinkers.  Those are a pleasure to read, particularly when your primary job sometimes seems to be solving problems, handling complaints, and putting out fires. Looking at all of the course evaluations also allows for useful professional development interventions.  Whether or not a given course evaluation is an accurate reflection of a particular teacher’s skill or success, as an aggregate the evaluations allow me to see the “outliers,” those whose scores are simply anomalous.  These scores then open conversations about what might have happened in a given semester and how a teacher might approach the course differently in the future. In the end I don’t know if course evaluations are useful for teachers.  I will say they are useful for me as an administrator not as a Big Brother tool to watch over the workers but rather as a quick indicator of the health of our program as a whole. I’ll end with a confession.  I almost never read my course evaluations.  My scores are usually really terrific but something in me deeply fears the comments. Go figure. ... View more

I recently reviewed two grade appeal cases that rested on the same grounds.  Both classes used Blackboard to record grades; both students thought they were passing based on the Blackboard grades; both students ended up not passing once attendance was factored in. I’ve never been fond of Blackboard.  It’s not just that its underlying technology always feels just a bit dated.  It’s that the tool itself is so clearly designed for massive lecture-based courses, making it rest awkwardly on top of smaller courses focused on writing.  But these appeals highlighted for me another danger: giving students the wrong impression of their progress in the course. Granted, it’s not really a problem with Blackboard.  Students are responsible for tracking their grades in a course and that includes being aware of policies regarding and penalties for excessive absences.  And in both cases I think, too, it would have been wise for the instructor to include a statement of the syllabus along the lines of “Since your attendance grade is not determined until the end of the class and since it can severely impact your overall grade you are strongly advised to consult with me about your progress if you have any questions or concerns or if you have missed class.”  So, yes, there is blame enough for all human involved.  But I can’t help blaming the technology as well, if only a bit. I often find myself in this bind: an ardent tech head at home but at times a near luddite in the classroom.  I find it a difficult marriage, technology and teaching.  Hardly a marriage, really—much more an extended if tumultuous courtship.  It’s a line I walk and walk again, stumbling along the way.  That’s all well and good since I believe in trying out technologies to help my students succeed but what happens when my experiments with technology harm students?  What happens when my use of technology fails them? I’m wondering about your experience with tech problems in the classroom, the kind that make the difference between a student succeeding and not in particular.  Have you ever tried something that failed so spectacularly that it undermined students or the course itself? ... View more

Apple celebrated the 30 th birthday of the Mac with a short film created in a single day and filmed entirely with iPhones. Setting aside my unabashed Apple fanboy-ness, I’m struck by the ways in which advanced technologies have saturated our lives.  I can remember early computer lab proposals that included funds for expensive video camera that students could check out and use to make multimodal projects.  What Apple’s film highlights for me is that fact that these days most students are carrying around a small production studio in their pockets, whether powered by iOS, Android, or Windows.  Phones increasingly have extremely capable cameras that can be used to capture both photos and videos; apps (many of them free) allow students to work with still and moving images to create any number of compositions. In light of all this, I am wondering about the future of computer labs.  We may not be at the “Internet of everything” but as technology becomes cheaper, more portable, and more pervasive some part of me does wonder if the computer classroom is an endangered species. Have any of you tried leveraging student-owned technology like cell phones in the composition classroom?  I find the possibilities tantalizing and I am wondering what people have tried… ... View more

In my last blog I discussed the difference between a formalist semiotic analysis and cultural one.  In this blog I would like to make that discussion more concrete by looking at one of the most popular ads broadcast during Super Bowl XLVIII.  Yup, “Puppy Love.” Let’s begin with the formal semiotics.  This is an ad with a narrative, but the narrative is conducted via visual images and a popular song voice over rather than through a verbal text.  The images are formal signs that tell us a story about a working horse ranch that is also a permanent source of puppies up for adoption—as signified by the carved sign permanently placed in front of a ranch house reading “Warm Springs Puppy Adoption.”  It is also important to note that while the ad could be denoting a dog rescue operation, the fact that we see a pen full of nothing but Golden Retriever puppies who are all of the same age suggests that it is more likely that the young couple who run the ranch and the puppy adoption facility are Golden Retriever breeders.  We’ll get back to this shortly. The visual narrative informs us, quite clearly, that one of the puppies is close friends with one of the Clydesdale horses on the ranch, and that he is unhappy when he (or she, of course) is adopted and taken away from the ranch.  We see a series of images of the puppy escaping from his (or her) new home by digging under fences and such and returning to the ranch.  After one such escape, the Clydesdales themselves band together to prevent the return of the puppy back to his adoptive home, and the final images show the puppy triumphantly restored to his rightful place with his friend on the ranch. It’s a heartwarming ad with a happy ending that is intended to pull at our heartstrings.  And that leads us to our first, and most obvious, cultural semiotic interpretation of the ad.  The ad assumes (and this is a good thing) a tender heartedness in its audience/market towards animals—especially puppies and horses.  It assumes that the audience will be saddened by the puppy’s unhappiness in being separated from his Clydesdale buddy, and will be elated when the puppy, together with Clydesdale assistance, is permanently reunited with his friend.  Of course, audience association of this elation with a group of Clydesdales (Budweiser’s most enduring animal mascot) will lead (the ad’s sponsors hope) to the consumption of Budweiser products. So, what’s not to like?  The first level of cultural semiotic interpretation here reveals that America is a land where it can be assumed that there are enough animal lovers that a sentimental mass market commercial designed for America’s largest mass media audience of the year will be successful.  Heck, (to reverse the old W.C. Fields quip) any country that likes puppies and horses can’t be all bad. But there is more to it than that.  As I watch this ad I cannot help but associate it with a movie that was made in 2009 called Hachi: A Dog’s Tale.  The movie was directed by an internationally famous director (Lasse Hallstrom) and starred actors no less than Richard Gere and Joan Allen (with a sort of cameo played by Jason Alexander).  And it was never released to U.S. theaters. Yes, that’s right.  While Hachi: A Dog’s Tale was released internationally, received decent reviews, and even made a respectable amount of money, this Richard Gere movie has only been accessible to American audiences through DVD sales.  With talent like that at the top of the bill, what happened?  Why wasn't it released to the theaters? Well, you see, the movie is based on a true story that unfolded in Japan before the Second World War.  It is the story of an Akita whose master died one day while lecturing at his university post and so never returned to the train station where the Akita had always greeted him upon returning home.  The dog continued to return to the train station most (if not every) evening for about ten years, sometimes escaping from his new owners in order to do so.  He finally was found dead in the streets. Hachiko, the original name of the dog, is a culture hero in Japan, and there is a statue of him at the train station where he kept vigil for ten years.  A movie about him was made in Japan in 1987, and while the U.S. version is Americanized, it is pretty faithful to the original story and to the Japanese film. Which probably explains while it never was released for U.S. theatrical distribution.  I mean, the thing is absolutely heartbreaking.  Have a look at the comments sections following the YouTube clips of the movie, or the Amazon reviews of the DVD: almost everyone says the same thing: how they weep uncontrollably whenever they watch the thing.  It is significant that the DVD cover for the movie makes it look like a warm and fuzzy “man’s best friend” flick that children and Richard Gere fans alike can love.  Yes, it's a rather good movie (the music is extraordinary), but warm and fuzzy it ain't. And this takes us to the next level of interpretation of “Puppy Love.”  Like Hachi, the puppy in the ad doesn’t want to be separated from someone he loves.  But unlike Hachi, the puppy is happily reunited with his friend in the end.  His tale is a happy one—and an unrealistic one.  It is a wrenching experience for all puppies to be adopted away from their families (which are their initial packs), but they don’t tend to be allowed to go back.  And animals are permanently separated from the people whom they love (and who loved them) all the time due to various circumstances which can never be explained to them.  This is what makes Hachi: A Dog’s Tale so heartrending: it reveals a reality that it is not comfortable to think about:  evidently this was too much reality for theatrical release. So “Puppy Love” distracts us from some uncomfortable realities, including the fact that puppies are bred all the time as commodities who will be separated from their original homes (that’s why the fact that the “Puppy Adoption” sign in the ad seems to indicate a breeding operation is significant) and have their hearts broken.  The ad makes us feel otherwise: that everything is OK.  This is what entertainment does, and that is what is meant by saying that entertainment is “distracting.”  But feeling good about puppy mills isn’t good for puppies.  And feeling good about the many hard realities of life can lessen audience desire to do something about those realities. And that takes us to a broader cultural-semiotic interpretation:  as Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno suggested over half a century ago, the American entertainment industry has been working for many years to distract its audience from the unpleasant realities of their lives, thus conditioning them to accept those realities.  Horkheimer and Adorno have gone out of fashion in recent years, but I still think that they have a lot to tell us about just why Americans continue to accept a status quo that is anything but heart warming. ... View more

Snow days… I remember them from my twelve years at Rutgers, though I must obnoxiously admit that lately I’ve had the AC on here in warm-but-slightly-muggy Florida.  My current institution is thus immune from the controversy that recently enveloped the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne when Chancellor Phyllis Wise declined to cancel school for snow, prompting an outpouring of hate in social media, much of it grouped under the odious hashtag #f**kphyllis.Wise’s response is a model of public civic discourse and the entire incident offers a useful metatext for the classroom.  There are a number of essays in Emerging that can assist: Rebekah Nathan, “Community and Diversity” Nathan’s essay, with its focus on the gap between the stated ideals of community and diversity on college campuses and the reality of life on those campuses, is an ideal starting point for this conversation, since the reaction to Wise starkly highlights that gap, particularly with the strong racial inflection of the response to Wise. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change” Gladwell is specifically responding to the notion of the “Twitter revolution” in this piece, discounting the ability of social media to create real change.  Given that Twitter was a primary avenue of student response to Wise’s actions, Gladwell’s essay can help students consider the ways in which Twitter and other social media platforms not only fail to promote social justice but in fact can be points of injustice. Jennifer Pozner, “Ghetto Bitches, China Dolls, and Cha Cha Divas” Pozner uses America’s Next Top Model to examine the ways in which reality TV perpetuates racial stereotypes.  Attacks against Wise deployed many of these stereotypes since they often focused on her gender and/or race. Wesley Yang, “Paper Tigers” Yang’s essay focuses more tightly on cultural stereotypes about Asian Americans, often exploding them.  Students can use his exploration to unearth and similarly explode the assumptions about Asian Americans embedded in student reactions to Wise. Of course, Wise’s own response is a great text for the classroom.  I think it would work well paired with these essays. ... View more

In my circle of friends, the Super Bowl is about only one thing: the ads.  2014 had many gems (who can forget Audi’s doberhuahua?) but one ad has generated quite a bit of controversy: Coke’s multi-lingual rendition of “America the Beautiful”. This quick clip from CNN outlines the sad but perhaps unsurprising reaction to the video: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/02/03/nr-brooke-coca-cola-ad-languages-outrage.cnn.html.Emerging offers a number of essays to help students explore the maelstrom around this ad; in this post I’d like to highlight four: Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation” and “The Primacy of Practice” Appiah’s piece is always my “go to” when broaching intercultural and multicultural issues since his notion of “cosmopolitanism” springs from the fact that in a crowded world living in isolation simply is no longer an option.  The challenge, then, is how to live next to and with others who are different.  His argument thus counters the comment “Speak English or Go Home” by suggesting not simply that America is (obviously) home but also that, well, there’s no place to “go,” no place to run to escape the existence of other cultures. Manual Muñoz, “Leave Your Name at the Border” Muñoz directly addresses the questions raised by Coke’s ad by looking at the pressures, benefits, risks, and costs of assimilation, specifically in relation to abandoning one’s language of origin for English. Steve Olson, “The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples” Students can use the reaction to Coke’s ad to unpack and complicate Olson’s arguments.  Olson looks to Hawaii to illustrate how, genetically speaking, race no longer exists.  This is not to say, though, that racism doesn’t.  Examining this Super Bowl ad in the context of Olson will help students think about the social structures that help race to persist. Leslie Savan, “What's Black, Then White, and Said All Over?” Savan’s essay makes a nice counterpoint to Coke’s ad since she focuses on the appropriation of subcultural, racially inflect language for commercial purposes.  Viewed through Savan, students could examine the ways in which Coke uses other language and cultures to sell more soda.  Savan thus turns the situation on its head, bringing focus back to Coke. ... View more

As I begin a new semester of teaching popular cultural semiotics, I'd like to succinctly sum up here—both for any of my students who may drop in to read this and, of course, for anyone else who may be interested—what the goal of cultural semiotics is.  The first thing to note is the qualifier "cultural":  that is, while cultural semiotics most certainly includes semiotics, as such, there can be a crucial difference between what a cultural-semiotic analysis is looking for and what other sorts of things semiotic analyses do.  For example, a semiotic analysis can be entirely formalistic in nature, seeking to decode the particular signs and symbols within one's subject—as, for instance, the sort of thing that I have seen in an online interpretation of Breaking Bad that focuses on the way colors were used in the show to signify character traits.  Such analyses can be quite similar to a New Critical reading of a text, and they are very useful indeed in the performance of a cultural-semiotic analysis; but a cultural-semiotic analysis goes beyond this to cultural signifiers that transcend such formal particulars. Taking as axiomatic that nothing in our commercialized popular culture would exist if there was not some expectation that it would find a market or audience, cultural semiotics, that is to say, analyzes the consumption of popular culture, and what that may say about its consumers.  Since the consumption of entertainments and many (if not most) consumer goods is voluntary (e.g., no one is forced to watch TV or the movies), we can assume that something in a popular cultural topic is attractive to its consuming audience.  To put this another way, to say that something is "only an entertainment" or is "only fashionable" is to miss the point: cultural semiotics begins with the presumption that the artifacts of popular cultural are intended to be entertaining or fashionable, and then asks what is the significance of the fact that large numbers of people are entertained or attracted by this? Saying that a movie or TV series, for instance, is entertaining because it is "distracting," however, isn't saying enough.  Yes, entertainments are distractions, but audiences are distracted by different kinds of entertainments at different times in history, so a cultural-semiotic analysis situates its topics not only in the present but also in relation to the past to see what differences may distinguish current popular cultural artifacts from past ones, and these differences guide the way to their interpretation. Thus, unlike a formalistic semiotic analysis, which can focus on a single topic as if it was frozen in time, a cultural-semiotic analysis has to contextualize its topics historically.  Often the same object of analysis means something different at different times, and those differences in meaning reflect differences in cultural consciousness. It is also important to note that a cultural-semiotic analysis is not an expression of esthetic taste or preference: that is, it is not a “review” or an opinion of whether something is entertaining or not.  At the same time, a cultural-semiotic analysis is not a moral judgment.  One may have moral opinions about the significance of one’s topic, but those opinions are not a part of the analysis, which is concerned with what is, not with what ought to be.  Similarly, while a cultural-semiotic analysis commonly involves politics, its politics is descriptive, not prescriptive.  Of course, the analyst will inevitably have political opinions with respect to the politics of a topic, but the expression of those opinions, while they may form part of the conclusion of an argumentative essay, is not what the analysis seeks—which is to be, as far as possible, an objective assessment of social meaning. In this regard, cultural semiotics, while pioneered by Roland Barthes, tries to avoid the kind of political self-privileging that Barthes explicitly claims in his book Mythologies when he identifies “myth” with the bourgeois Right and (rather laboriously) seeks to exempt the Left from “mythic” discourse.  For a cultural-semiotic analysis in the sense I am describing here, mythology—the coded systems of signs within which cultures live and communicate—can be found everywhere, and can be decoded accordingly. So, whether you are looking at Lady Gaga or Duck Dynasty, the goal is the same: a cultural analysis of what their popularity signifies.  You can be a fan, or not, of their esthetics and/or politics, but your cultural-semiotic analysis isn’t concerned with that.  It is concerned with social significance. ... View more

While I realize that the problem is not really a brand new one, I have only recently become aware that there is a lot of very good popular cultural analysis available on the Internet in video form.  Well, what's wrong with that?  After all, the Internet is an absolutely indispensible resource for popular cultural semiotics, a treasure trove of up-to-date primary and secondary source material that I now wonder how I ever did without in my own writing and teaching.  So how could there possibly be a problem here? The problem, I'm afraid, is that video-format analyses are not detectable by Turnitin or by any other language based search engine detection method.  For while a video certainly contains plenty of language, its sentences are spoken, not written, and thus are not able to be captured by any search method of which I am aware.  My concern here is not that intellectual property may therefore be appropriated without attribution (after all, the producers of such video content generally are open source aficionados with little interest in personal copyright protection) but that student writing may be rewarded for undocumented insights that are not the student's own.  And this, as I tell all of my students when I explain the rationale for academic strictures with respect to plagiarism, is why I am a rigorous enforcer of such strictures. That is, if a student paper is filled with sharp but undocumented analyses that an instructor believes to be the student's who wrote the paper, that paper is likely to get a higher grade than a paper that was written honestly, and that is stealing not so much from the true author of the analyses (who, I admit, does not lose anything thereby) but from other students (who may lose a lot because the playing field has been tilted).  It's the same thing as with the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports: someone gets an illicit extra edge.  That matters to me, and should matter to our students as well. I am not going to name any particular video analyses here for various reasons, but I will describe one way that an instructor of popular cultural semiotics can both detect and avoid their successful illicit use—beyond, of course, explaining to students that they must be documented just as any other source must be documented.  This is to construct assignments that require students to set up their own systems of association and difference within which to situate their topics as signs within a semiotic system.  Online video analyses tend to be formalistic in manner, focusing an analysis of a film or television program much in the manner of a New Critical reading of a text.  Such analyses can be quite clever and enlightening with respect to the individual popular text, but they aren't the goal of a popular cultural semiotic analysis, whose goal is to interpret the social significance of the text, and that requires broad contextualization.  To put this another way, the goal of a cultural-semiotic reading of a text is not an intrinsic description of its signs and symbols, it is an extrinsic interpretation of that text with respect to social history. So, here is something else to keep in mind both when assigning and reading student essays in a class on popular cultural semiotics—and, for that matter, student essays in any class on any subject.  Youtube, et al (and this includes university based sites, as well, I suppose, as the TED lectures) is filled with useful, but undetectable, material.  I hadn't thought of it before, but it is worth passing the word along. ... View more

I don’t often get the chance to chat with teachers outside my program using Emerging.  That’s about to change.  Next semester we’re hoping to have several guest bloggers talking about using the text and the challenges they face both with the text and in the classroom.<! more > This isn’t a series of pat promos.  I’m hoping for critical dialogue and engaged interaction.  That’s the goal for my classroom as well, because it’s that kind of conversation that leads to informed revision and ultimately better writing.  That process (as I try to remind students) doesn’t just belong to the isolated world of the writing classroom.  I think it’s inherent to all writing and just as important for larger issues—civic engagement, political action, personal decision making. So look for new voices and if you’d like to join in let me know.  Erm, I’m not sure how (since most comments on this blog end up as spam ) but I’ll work with the Bedford folks to find avenues for you to contribute. I definitely look forward to hearing what you have to say! ... View more

At this point in the semester, my students have pretty much mastered the “blah, blah, and blah” argument.  What’s that? Well, my most recent assignment prompt asked students to use Wesley Yang’s “Paper Tigers” and two other readings from the semester to “determine the key factors necessary for personal development and success.” The “blah, blah, and blah” argument looks something like this: “Success is gained through personal development through different ties and connections, individualizing oneself from communities, and taking risks.”  I’m not complaining about this; for my course it’s a solid argument, one that offers clear points and a sense of the overall organization of the paper.  The problem is that it’s just a listing of points; the problem is that it’s the ghost of the five paragraph essay; the problem is that it’s blah. Some students have broken through into complexity.  Witness this example: “The core solution to obtaining personal development and success is to be an individual. Finding a sense of individuality must be achieved before all others steps; otherwise you would get lost in networking and entrap yourself in little loyalties. Once you find your sense of individuality, you may begin to properly network and avoid little loyalties; allowing you to form weak and strong ties to victoriously move up the ladder of personal development and success.”  The “blah”’s are still there: be an individual, avoid networking to escape little loyalties (this from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change” and Rebekah Nathan’s “Community and Diversity”), and form weak and strong ties.  The difference is, of course, that this student has shown the relationship between the elements of the argument. That’s where we focused class tonight: moving beyond the blahs.  We took several list-type arguments and students revised them with a sense of the relationships between each connection to move the arguments towards greater complexity.  Often, those relationships were simply expressed as sequences (first do blah, then you can do blah, which will let you do blah)—a step in the right direction.  But other students were able to describe more complex relationships (blah is critical and first requires blah, though it can be complicated by blah if one isn’t careful about blah and blah). The students got it, I think.  Showing the relationships doesn’t just make the argument stronger.  It sets up fluid transitions, offers a map of the whole argument for the reader, and just makes the paper easier to write.  This is their last paper.  I’m hoping to see less blah and a whole lot more “ah ha!” ... View more

On December 8 it will be the 33'd anniversary of the death of John Lennon.  In this year of historic anniversaries (the Gettysburg Address's and the Battle's 150th; the 50th year since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy), Lennon's will not loom so large, and that is as it should be.  There are vaster things to think about. But I wish to ruminate a bit on John Lennon here—not on his music nor even on the man himself, but, rather, on his place in history.  Because while John Lennon never set out to do so and was always more than a bit uncomfortable with the idea, he did change the world.  Or, to be more precise, the world changed, hurtling him and his fellow Beatles to the head of a raucous procession that they never intended to lead, but without whom the parade might never have begun. For what the Beatles did was to begin the process through which our modern entertainment culture has been built.  By "entertainment culture" I mean that state of affairs in which entertainment, once set aside for special holiday and leisure moments (what Henri Lefebvre called "Festival"), has become the dominant feature in our lives.  In an entertainment culture, everything is expected to be entertaining, and entertainers are the focus of everything.  It is in an entertainment culture that most people don't watch the news, they watch infotainment, and the news strives, in order to survive, to be more entertaining.  Indeed, it is in an entertainment culture that Miley Cyrus is news, and continues to be news. The Beatles did not invent this.  After all, in the Golden Era of Hollywood, the stars of the silver screen founded the era of the celebrity, and Babe Ruth was as popular as any current sports hero.  Music has known its Bobby Soxers, and Elvis Presley is still the King.  But the worldwide hysteria that greeted the Beatles in 1964—the Beatlemania that is the standard against which all popular cultural phenomena ever since have been measured—still marked a quantitative change.  Whatever one thinks of the Beatles' music (personally, I still find it magnificent, but that isn't the point), its impact can hardly be overstated. That impact has been two-fold.  First, it demonstrated that the youth market (and the potential for that market) was greater than had ever before been appreciated.  Elvis was one thing, and so was Sinatra, but their effect was nothing like this.  And second, the realization of the potential of the youth market (especially in America) gave the young power that they had never had before.  You could say that the Beatles were in the right place at the right time: just at the point when the largest generation of children in American history were beginning to grow up, coddled and restless and groping for their own place in the world.  The Beatles, who only wanted to sell records, opened up a way. One might say that the Beatles were the match that lit up the Baby Boom generation and launched America into the full tide of what is still a youth culture.  But because the spark lay in entertainment, as opposed to other forces that have moved masses of people in years past, it could easily be commodified, and thus coopted.  The "revolution" that came so readily to the lips of Baby Boomers in the 1960s could never become serious when it came wrapped in pleasure and was little more than a pose to sell records (the Rolling Stones were never really street fighting men). And so, the paradoxical legacy of those Liverpudlian moptops who seemed to challenge the Establishment back in '64 has been mostly a huge boon to capitalism, helping to launch a hedonistic consumer society grounded in entertainment.  It all probably would have happened eventually without the Beatles, but that doesn't change the fact that they were the ones at the center of it all, Pied Pipers to a future that is now. ... View more

I want to return to my recent critical moment during grading.  In short, I was frustrated—not because of the amount of work involved (that’s just par for the course at this point) but because students had problems with things we had gone over in class again and again.  I felt both angry and like a failure.  Then I realized I was just stuck in Clockwork Christ mode. “Clockwork Christ” is a term I coined over my years working new Graduate Teaching Assistants (it’s also the name/subject for an article I’d like to write some day, if my administrative work load ever lightens (as if) so, “dibs!”).  The concept comes in part from my teaching experience but I am also indebted to the work of Richard E. Miller, especially in “The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling” (College English 1998).  I use the term to index two dominant and contradictory narratives of teaching that circulate in culture, narratives that we as teachers often tend to inhabit, enact, and embody whether cast in the role by our students or ourselves. It’s easy to identify these narratives.  The first is teacher-as-Christ, the one who sacrifices everything so that students can experience the transformative powers of education.  Based on your age, you know this figure from To Sir with Love, The Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Sister Act II, Freedom Writers, Stand and Deliver, or School of Rock.  Depending on your theoretical inclinations, you know it too through the work of Paulo Freire or Peter Elbow.  The narrative is simple: teacher encounters victimized and distrustful students; teacher passionately devotes self to “saving” these students (often through unorthodox pedagogies); students are transformed. But running alongside this narrative is a second, inverse narrative of teacher-as-cog, the mindless functionary of a bureaucracy bent on grinding students into dust.  Based on your age, you know this figure from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in The Wall.”  Depending on your theoretical inclinations, you might find it in David Bartholomae or Gerald Graff. Practically I see these narratives manifest in new teachers all the time.  The same teacher will, one week, hold extra office hours on the weekend (though few if any students will show up) and the next week wait with a slathering snarl for some student to miss one more class so they can rigidly implement our attendance policy, fail them from the class, and have one less paper to grade. I don’t think we can escape from these dual narratives but we can become aware of them, which is what I did while grading.  More than that, we can deploy them. I can’t believe I’m about to share this in the everlasting medium of the Web since I have always only shared it orally with the caveat I would strenuously disavow the words but, well, here goes… I offer you the “nuclear option.”  The nuclear option foregrounds the disjuncture of these two narratives to “shock” students at the moment most needed.  Before revealing it, there are some important points to keep in mind.  First, in order for it to work you must learn your students’ names on the first day of class.  If you can manage this, they will love you because they are nothing but a nameless face in every other class they are taking as first year students (Step One: Deploy Christ).  Second, you can use this option once and only once.  I wait for that point in the semester when students are just not doing the readings, not showing up with drafts, not “there” in any real sense.  At that moment, I stand before them and I move to Step Two: Deploy Clockwork.  I say something like this, “Look, if no one wants to do this work we can all just go home.  I’m happy to do all I can to help you pass this class but the truth is it doesn’t really matter to me because I get paid the same whether you pass or fail.”  The reaction is almost always the same: they feel guilty (their own Christ reaction) and therefore re-energized. Ummm, in case anyone asks, I did not write this post. ... View more

I recently finished up work for a paper I’m presenting at SAMLA (“Well-Played, WPA: Promoting Growth in an Era of Budget Cuts”).  I open the paper with a number of “koans,” zen-like paradoxes that contain profound truths.  One of them is this simple fact: There is no WPA theory (yes, with a slight nod to The Matrix). That there is no WPA theory is more than a paradox; it is in fact a common genuflection within most WPA theory.  That is, many discussions of theoretical approaches to writing program administration open with some acknowledgement that the actual practices of administration are inextricably bound to local conditions. I especially like Jeanne Gunner’s configuration of this fact in “Cold Pastoral: The Moral Order of an Idealized Form”: “general rules apply only weakly to varying local conditions (a WPA truism)” (29). What makes it a koan is the fact that, despite that acknowledgement, we continue to theorize. But because any generalized theory is at best partially useful, we share narratives as well—a combination of abstraction and practicality, theory and praxis, why we did something but (more importantly) what we did. I can’t help but think that teaching is much the same.  There are lots of theories, lots of pedagogies, but there is, balancing all of that, an equal (if not more massive) accumulation of lore.  That is, as with running a writing program, when we teach we often do what works without having to know why. An odd discipline we are.  I sometimes wonder why all of Composition/Rhetoric doesn’t just implode. ... View more

Well, the dude with the big hammer just pulled off the biggest box office debut for quite some time, and such a commercial success calls for some semiotic attention. There is an obvious system within which to situate Thor: The Dark World and thus begin our analysis. This, of course, is the realm of the cinematic superhero, a genre that has absolutely dominated Hollywood film making for quite some time now. Whether featuring such traditional superheroes as Batman, Spider Man, and Superman, or such emergent heavies as Iron Man and even (gulp!) Kick-Ass, the superhero movie is a widely recognized signifier of Hollywood’s timid focus on tried-and-true formulae that offer a high probability of box office success due to their pre-existing audiences of avid adolescent males. Add to this the increasingly observed cultural phenomenon that adulthood is the new childhood (or thirty is the new fourteen), and you have a pretty clear notion of at least a prominent part of the cultural significance of Thor’s recent coup. But I want to look at a somewhat different angle on this particular superhero’s current dominance that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere. This is the fact that, unlike all other superheroes, Thor comes from an actual religion (I recognize that this bothered Captain America’s Christian sensibilities in The Avengers, but a god is a god). And while the exploitation of their ancestors’ pagan beliefs is hardly likely to disturb any modern Scandinavians, this cartoonish revision of an extinct cultural mythology is still just a little peculiar. I mean, why Thor and not, say, Apollo, or even Dionysus? I think the explanation is two-fold here, and culturally significant in both parts. The first is that the Nordic gods were, after all, part of a pantheon of warriors, complete with a kind of locker/war room (Valhalla) and a persistent enemy (the Jotuns, et al) whose goal was indeed to destroy the world. (That the enemies of the Nordic gods were destined to win a climactic battle over Thor and company (the Ragnarok, or Wagnerian Gotterdammerung), is an interesting feature of the mythology that may or may not occur in a future installment of the movie franchise.) But the point is that Norse mythology offers a ready-made superhero saga to a market hungering for clear-cut conflicts between absolute bad guys whose goal is to destroy the world and well-muscled good guys who oppose them: a simple heroes vs. villains tale. You don’t find this in Greek mythology, which is always quite complicated and rather more profound in its probing of the complexities and contradictions of human life and character. But I suspect that there is something more at work here. I mean, Wagner, the Third Reich's signature composer, didn’t choose Norse mythology as the framework for his most famous opera by accident. And the fact is that you just don’t get any more Aryan than blonde Thor is (isn’t it interesting that the troublesome Loki, though part of the Norse pantheon too, somehow doesn’t have blonde hair? Note also in this regard how the evil Wormtongue in Jackson's The Lord of the Rings also seems to be the only non-blonde among the blonde Rohirrim). The Greeks, for their part, weren't blondes. So is the current popularity of this particular Norse god a reflection of a coded nostalgia for a whiter world? In this era of increasing racial insecurity as America’s demographic identity shifts, I can’t help but think so. ... View more