In a previous edition (the 7th) of Signs of Life in the USA, I presented a semiotic interpretation of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as a hands-on illustration of how to conduct semiotic analyses of popular movies. Focusing on the critical difference between Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman and Heath Ledger's Academy Award winning interpretation of the role, I noted that while Nicholson’s Joker "was far more violent and sadistic than any Joker in the past, he "was motivated by desires that his audience could understand: He wanted money, he wanted power, and he wanted revenge . . . . We may not be on his side, but we can understand him." In contrast, Ledger's Joker "doesn’t want power, as is evident from the fact that while he makes war on the mob, he does not attempt to build his own organization . . . . And he doesn’t want money, which is dramatically symbolized by his setting fire to a huge pile of cash atop which sits the mob’s accountant. He doesn't really seem to want revenge (even his indications that he was cruelly raised—suggesting thereby a possible revenge motive emerging from his childhood—are undercut by later speeches that make it clear that he will say just about anything, no matter how untrue). And he doesn’t want sex (Nicholson’s Joker had a girlfriend, though she was horribly abused; Ledger’s Joker is completely unattached). Basically, all he wants to do is create mayhem and make people suffer as much as possible." Tying this difference to a promotional poster of Nolan's Batman featuring an image of the Caped Crusader standing in front of a New York City skyscraper whose upper stories appear to be on fire (clearly evoking some of the most searing images of the 9/11 attacks), along with the significant subtitle, "Welcome To A World Without Rules," I concluded that "Ledger’s Joker is very much a reflection of the terroristic violence of our times. Simply stated, Ledger’s Joker is a terrorist, and as such he raises an important question that is very explicitly presented in the movie: namely, how can a society fight terrorism without becoming terroristic itself? Batman: The Dark Knight both reflects and addresses this larger cultural dilemma by dramatizing the choices that civilized societies must make when battling enemies who do not seem to respect any limits. Thus, while Batman is willing to break some rules to fight the Joker, he is not willing to kill him when he has him at his mercy (the Joker even anticipates this as he dares Batman to kill him and so become like the Joker himself). Reflecting the dilemma that Americans face when confronted by such shadowy organizations as Al Qaida, Batman: The Dark Knight was ultimately a profoundly political film which raised questions about the conduct of the entire war on terror." I recall this analysis now as America is being confronted with an ever-growing threat of domestic terrorism, with the massacre in Buffalo being the latest in a seemingly unending string of such attacks. And, as so often seems to be the case now in the digital age, there appears to be a trail of prior actions and Internet posts that, if effectively handled, could have led to measures that might have prevented the tragedy. But as law enforcement authorities would tell us, if an arrest was made every time someone posts disturbing content on the Internet, or acts weird at school or at work, a good proportion of the country would be in jail. And so we are once again faced with The Dark Knight conundrum: namely, how can a society fight terrorism without becoming terroristic itself? What liberties are we willing to give up for the sake of public safety? What liberties, the Constitution being what it is, are we able to give up? These are not rhetorical questions on my part. And no, I'm afraid that I do not have the answers. ... View more

  As I completed my first fully ungraded writing course this semester, I faced up to the inevitable: I still had to post a university-required final grade after a liberating semester without them. While I have done ungraded portions of my classes for many years, this small upper level writing seminar was the perfect opportunity to try a fully ungraded course … an opportunity that left me surprised by how my students and I ultimately felt about putting in a final grade. That was one of many end-of-semester surprises I’m still thinking through. I sure loved the freedom of crafting innovative assignments  that offered more space for creativity, knowing I wouldn’t have to encapsulate my feedback on student efforts in a single letter grade. I relished instead letting my comments drive the progress between scaffolded drafts. I converted our courseware site to “Incomplete” or “Complete” and reveled in the conversations after each assignment when students decided whether they had completed the expectations of the assignment and their own abilities, or whether they wanted to work further on the essay. Sometimes those conversations were downright giddy: “I surprised myself in this final draft.” “The risks I took were pretty fun, actually!” What I hadn’t anticipated was how emotional the discussions about the final grade would be for some students. After all, I had been transparent from the start of the semester that we would decide their final grade together in a self-reflective conversation they would lead. I let them know they should be ready to talk about their process, growth, learning, and plans for the future. It was a strong group of writers, and I reminded them often throughout the course that they were meeting my highest expectations, and that in grade-speak they were all doing “A” work. I thought that after all the feedback and many meetings over the semester, our final conversations would be a simple and celebratory. A few were. In several cases, though, very strong students had real difficulty saying the words “I deserve an A for all I accomplished this semester.” Sometimes students would say they didn’t want to seem “braggy,” and I’d gently help them unpack the difference between being conceited and honestly assessing one’s strengths, and why this was an important lesson to carry forward in all parts of their lives. I tried to keep quiet as students ventured into the strange territory of putting a conclusive grade on work which we had all semester thought of as work in progress. Some students would claim they only “deserved a B or a C,” and seemed to want me to offer the higher grade for them. Instead, I kept prompting them to reflect on their growth until they landed with some confidence on the grade — inevitably higher — that more accurately represented their learning.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that these conversations prompted some tears. After all, the equation of grades with self-worth — or shame — is deeply engrained.  As I held out the Kleenex box and offered space for their reflections, I resolved to make this type of reflection a more substantial part of future class discussions. Certainly, the emotional depth of those exchanges has made me all the more committed to addressing the institutional “need” for grades. As always, our colleagues are a wonderful resource. The #Ungrading conversation on Twitter about navigating the end of the semester is nuanced, with experienced ungraders and novices mulling over these academic conventions and institutional restrictions. I have found those discussions to be helpful and reassuring. They are also fundamentally democratic in a time when such thoughts are necessary for us as instructors and citizens, I’d argue. Susan Bernstein speaks my mind eloquently in her recent post on concerns for our students in this alarming time of democratic erosion. There’s a lot to think about this summer as we find time to rest and to prepare ourselves and our students for the work ahead.   Photo Credit: “Weighted Companion Cube Tissue Box Cover” by Mandy Jouan is used under a CC By-NC-ND 2.0 license. ... View more

Michael A. Reyes teaches first-year writing and literature of the Americas at Cal Lutheran University and Cal State LA. He specializes in rhetorical genre theory and contemporary Latinx docupoetry. He’s also the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing and a former member of the Bedford New Scholars Advisory Board.   Two years ago, a Cal State LA student petition circulated around social media. It was a petition to grant all students at the university A’s. The reason? The coronavirus pandemic had made any equitable learning, and therefore fair distribution of grades, impossible. The petition was thesis-driven and so well-organized with diverse appeals and sources. It was truly a great demonstration of the critical thinking and writing I hope to inspire in my students! It was this spring 2020 petition that sparked my interest in seeking alternatives to traditional grade and point systems. I agreed with the students’ argument that the difference between a passing and failing grade is less about being apathetic and instead much more to do with resources and accessibility. So, I spent the summer developing my own version of Asao B. Inoue’s course grading contract, which I was assigned to read during my graduate studies. My goal was to introduce to students a new way of being motivated that didn’t include the pressure and standardization of letter grades on their assignments. The outcome would be the same: receive a final course grade. But, how I guided them to that outcome would be extremely different. Instead of receiving a letter grade or point value, all assignments would receive a “Complete” or an “Incomplete.” In doing so, I imagined that I would further open my classrooms to a pluriversality of writing and reading levels, especially when a student’s “best” may look a lot different during the pandemic. I presented the grading contract to my classes on day one of the fall 2020 semester. It included my rationale for the contract: to decentralize my role and instead place students as authorities in their own reading and writing growth; to acknowledge labor over expertise and understand that one semester is not enough to dictate “meeting” or “advanced” reading and writing skills; and to have students be motivated by feedback and collaboration. The grading contract also included the table I’d use to determine their final course grades: Final Course Grade # of Missing or Incomplete Assignments A 0-2 A- 3 B+ 4 B 5 B- 6 C+ 7 C 8 C- 9 No Credit 10 or more   To my surprise, no students protested (and haven’t during my 2 years of using it). They each accepted the terms, and saw it as a chance to, as one first-year student noted in a post-grading contract reflection assignment: “. . . take your time and try to write as well as you can without fear that everything has to be perfect. For this class you will find your writing style and your voice. It sounds cheesy I know but I’m being serious.” My obvious concern was that students would take it for granted and submit haphazard work, but that was never an issue. I credit my use of a TILT framework that clearly communicated what would constitute a “Complete” for each assignment. Additionally, this called on me to revise a few of my weekly reading responses and rhetorical précis assignments to be less frequent but a bit more challenging. For instance, I only assigned one homework assignment per week, which would ideally allow for student comprehension and transformation to sink in. Students would therefore not be punished for taking natural pauses to work through difficulties. The quality of my assignments seemed to also improve since I had to design them for productive difficulties. I anticipated that the less frequent and more manageable the assignments were, while still promoting productive struggle, the more students had a real chance to think about their thinking and then submit. It’s been two years since first implementing a course grading contract in all my classes, from developmental to advanced composition, and even in inter-American literature courses. Summer breaks seem to be my reflection periods. So, as a new one approaches, I’m committing to working through a few realizations I’ve made—some good, some not so good: In an access-oriented institution with no corequisites, this allowed for students to be comfortable with where they were at—truly living up to the age-old motto of meeting students where they’re at. My grading anxiety reduced so much. I no longer worried about the high stakes implications of giving a student one point more or one point less on an assignment. Students were more encouraged to read the feedback to see how I and their peers were interpreting their choices. I also saw a lot more risks! Although I tried, not all assignments required the same amount of “labor,” so some missed assignments were higher stakes than others. To be honest, I’m still unsure about how to address this. Can and should a final draft of an essay carry the same weight as a 200-word reading response? I concluded that students, particularly in my composition classes, should check in more frequently with the grading contract (not just at the beginning and end) via journal reflections to build a more thorough understanding about the value of this system. In other words, I want to build more feedback loops for me to see how students are processing their growth and not associating this with the discourse of grades. I wondered how a course grading contract’s value changes depending on the course. I found it valuable for creativity and risk-taking in my upper-division courses where students already had a stronger grasp of university rhetorical genres and had less confusion about “hidden curriculum.” However, I found it valuable for inspiring affective approaches to my first-year composition classes. These students could freely unlearn and learn academic assumptions and writing conventions. In other words, learn academic conventions through play. The grading contract did not interfere with course outlines nor department common reading and writing assignments, which was always my leading pitch to my department chairs and program directors. My approach, after presenting it at an end-of-semester English department showcase, was adopted in the Graduate Teaching Associate’s Program at Cal State LA and moved tenured faculty to have informal and formal conversations about assessments. The talks, however, have slowed down. I imagine next steps would be the chair forming a committee. This entire move was DEIJ-motivated—a desire to move away from the arbitrariness of grades and points. However, how can I better rationalize my final course grade table? At the moment, to be honest, it does read a bit arbitrarily – the line between three missing assignments and four, between an A and a B, can be a thin one. Achieving equity can’t happen in one semester. Equity is urgent, but I’m finding it okay to be slow-paced to allow for deeper reflections along the way. And, to allow for more energy into making one strong and detailed contribution, as opposed to many mediocre ones during a semester. ... View more

May seems like a very good month to celebrate teachers, as the school year draws to an end and award and commencement ceremonies blossom. For ten years now, the month has been marked so by the Academy for Teachers in New York City, an organization whose mission is “to honor and support teachers through world-class learning experiences that inspire them to continue changing lives, in the classroom and beyond.” Started by author Sam Swope, the Academy offers “master classes” to teachers from New York schools, the first of which occurred on May 31, 2012, when Professor James Shapiro of Columbia led a college-like seminar on Hamlet. As Swope described it Shapiro, a world-class scholar who’s been living and breathing Shakespeare for decades, started with the play’s first lines: “Who’s there!” “Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself!” “Long live the king!” Time stopped for the teachers. An hour later, they were still only a few lines in. Everyone needs their minds blown from time to time. Teachers more than most. Swope and master class teachers like Rinne Groff, Billy Collins, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gail Collins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jill Lepore, and lots and lots of others have been blowing minds and celebrating teachers ever since. This year, for the first time, I was able to attend the annual “Show Teachers the Love!” celebration, held on May 9 at the New York Historical Society. In this year of ongoing division and seemingly eternal COVID, this was the perfect antidote: an evening that saluted teachers everywhere, and especially those associated with the Academy and with their new Early Career Fellows program. Over its ten years, the Academy has hosted 300+ master classes for 3,000 teachers from 600 public, charter, and private schools, who collectively teach 30,000 kids every year. I’d say that’s pretty impressive. The evening’s gala kicked off with music by The Scooches and was emceed by comedian Bonnie McFarlane, who introduced us to a performance by Rosie’s Theater Kids, dance by Yin Yue, tap by Ayodele Casel (I could hardly stay in my seat for that one!), music from Harp & Plow, and a reading by John Turturro of the Academy’s 2022 “Stories Out of School” Flash Fiction Contest winner, “Sunshower,” by Australian teacher Josephine Sarvaas. (You can read this fabulous “story out of school,” which was published in A Public Space, here.) For me, however, the highlight of the evening was playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s presentation of the Woodridge Award for Great Teachers to his high school English and drama teacher, Candace Owen-Williams. Harris, whose highly acclaimed Slave Play garnered numerous Tony nominations, spoke at length about growing up as a tall, skinny, queer Black kid in a small, deeply conservative town in Virginia, about the bullying and harassment, about feeling unseen and unheard, not to mention unappreciated. Except that his English teacher, Mrs. Owen-Williams, stayed after school to listen to and encourage him, to nurture his obvious talents, to help him mount a production of The Laramie Project at their school (she had also been Matthew Shepard’s teacher. . .), to pursue college, and especially to pursue his dreams. The audience, hushed and rapt, listened hard and then burst into lengthy applause when the award was presented, and kept cheering, and cheering, as teacher and former student shared the moment. It is one I will not soon forget. Is there a teacher who inspired and supported you? And what of those students you have inspired and supported? Who would you like to give an Award for Great Teachers to? As this month of May progresses, I am thinking of so many great teachers I have learned from. I want to thank and to honor them all. Image Credit: Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages, used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license ... View more

An article I wrote in 2021 explores the value of using concordancing software as a tool for pedagogical reflection. The practice is simple: faculty collect a set of assignments, reflections, or open-ended evaluations from students into a single document, and the resulting file is analyzed via word cloud software (such as this free version) or a concordancing program (such as AntConc) to discover patterns of lexical use that point to dominant themes in the data.    In May, as I am wrapping up my first semester as coordinator of a Writing Fellows program (tied closely this past year to our first-year composition and corequisite courses), I have decided to look at the second-semester reflections of the student fellows through the lens of lexical analysis. As might be expected, the most common noun mentioned was students; after all, the fellows program is student-centered, and tutoring reflections understandably center on the fellows’ interactions with students. But among the many other words that were highlighted in my analysis, one in particular stood out:  wait. When I looked more closely, it was clear that students used this word only when conjoined to another: time. Wait-time was a concept that one of the fellows had encountered as part of training she had received as a supplemental instructor for our university; she later chose an article about wait-time in second-language instruction as a basis for a seminar discussion she led. The fellows group as a whole latched onto this idea as a critical factor—not just for tutoring, but for writing, learning, and thinking in general.    Wait-time—for processing, exploring, testing ideas, playing with language—underlies much of the learning process. (And as I pointed out in a post a couple of weeks ago, our time-bound schedules for classes and semesters often militate against wait-time, both on a macro and micro scale.) When wait-time is offered, learners move forward at a pace that suits them, and they can (perhaps) carry ideas forward as well, ideas that might otherwise have been abandoned in the effort to keep up with the instructor or the tutor or the clock.   After two intense semesters of collaborative learning with these student writing fellows, we are facing a long summer break. Fortunately, all but one of the fellows will be returning to the program in the fall; in fact, I considered this past week giving the fellows some sort of summer assignment—reading a book, journaling, revising their “philosophy of tutoring” statements, mapping out personal goals for the fall, or doing some thematic coding of data we collected during the past year. But I think, instead, I am going to consider this summer an extended form of wait-time—just to see what happens, both for the fellows and for myself. Many of them will be doing what I would assign anyway, as part of their normal routines. But I don’t want to determine what that practice looks like for any of them; I’d like to see where this wait-time takes them—as writers, tutors, readers, and whatever else they are becoming.   Our work in first-year composition programs—and with other undergraduate programs—is always going to be constrained by institutional schedules and timeframes. But having seen the results of wait-time across semesters (as well as across months or years in creative and collaborative projects), I am wondering how we might invite extended wait-time in spite of those institutional constraints.  Any thoughts? I’ll be considering that question this summer—and waiting to see what possibilities emerge. ... View more

  Lately I have been spending a lot of time in Malibu Creek State Park, a spectacular setting popular with deer, coyotes, skunks, mallards, geese, herons, hikers, runners, rock climbers, mountain bikers, and movie/TV buffs—the latter due to the many productions whose outdoor scenes have been filmed here over the years on what used to be land owned by 20th Century Fox. Visitors may recognize scenic backdrops from cinematic classics such as How Green Was My Valley, Planet of the Apes, and (most famously) M*A*S*H—both the movie and television spinoff. While I am tempted to write here about the tricky passage from the park's Century Lake to the M*A*S*H filming site (tricky, at least, for a sixty-something man on a mountain bike), that topic isn't really pertinent to a cultural-semiotic analysis. The M*A*S*H franchise, on the other hand, most certainly is. So here goes. As with most semiotic analyses, the key to the analysis begins in a difference, in this case, the difference between the popular movie of 1970 and the even more popular television series of 1972-1983 (for the sake of brevity, I am not including the 1968 novel upon which both the movie and the series were based). To begin with, then, in the days before subscription networks like HBO broke through the limitations placed upon commercial television, M*A*S*H the movie could be much raunchier, and gorier, than the TV series ever could be. The differences between the two in that respect signify just how much things have changed since the 1970s, with TV fare like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones pushing boundaries that not even the movies dared to explore fifty years ago. Much more significantly, the blatant sexism of M*A*S*H the movie was considerably toned down in the television version, reflecting (especially as the series developed) the growing influence of the women's movement on American popular culture through the course of the decade. Any extended analysis of the M*A*S*H franchise would accordingly need to take both of these differences into account. But my focus here will be upon another difference, the difference, that is to say, between the way that the movie and the series mediated America's experience of the Vietnam War, for while both were clearly understood as metaphors for that war, their takes on it were quite distinct from one another. The movie presented a sharp satirical attack on the conduct of an increasingly unpopular war as U.S. Army officials led their unwilling conscripts into harm’s way. The series, on the other hand, softened that attack considerably (the development of the character of Colonel Sherman T. Potter—who does not appear in the film—is particularly striking in this respect) to focus instead on a more generic anti-war sentiment. This gentling down of the film's biting satire is probably what most accounts for the immense success of the TV series, a success reflected in the fact that 105.9 million viewers (almost half of the U.S. population at the time) tuned in for its final episode, even though, unlike television series such as The X-Files and Lost, it had no tangled webs to unweave, nor, unlike shows such as Game of Thrones, did it have a complex, series-long plot line to bring to a conclusion. In the series finale, the Korean War simply ends and the characters head home. But the broad sweep of its final audience shows how M*A*S*H managed to bring together tens of millions of Americans who, not so very long before, had been bitterly divided by a failed war—and the larger cultural conflicts that accompanied that failure. This achievement was not accomplished by accident, for the M*A*S*H series went out of its way to give something to almost everyone. For those who had opposed the Vietnam War, it maintained the anti-war vibe of the movie, along with a gentler version of its sixties-style attacks on military authority. But for those who resented the anti-Vietnam War movement, there was that far less caustic, much more simply comedic, take on the armed services, with a fatherly Colonel Potter and a buffoonish Major Frank Burns (face it, Larry Linville was no Robert Duvall) to soothe them. And, probably most important of all, there was Alan Alda (no Donald Sutherland was he) as Hawkeye Pierce, irreverent and full of mischief but ultimately a sentimental and even reassuring emotional anchor through eleven seasons. The role that would establish Alda as the face of a new kind of masculinity: the so-called “sensitive man of the 1970s.”  Thus M*A*S*H the TV show mediated and reflected the social movement of a decade when America pulled back from the tumults of the sixties, softening many of the sharp edges of that more revolutionary time (those now-ridiculed male hairstyles were long-hair lite, while seventies-style "soft rock" speaks for itself) as the counter-culture came of age and joined the Establishment—a process that would find its own reflection in 1983's The Big Chill. But there were other historical processes at work, because even as Americans gathered around the small screen for the final episode of M*A*S*H, a counter-revolution was already underway. The Reagan era had begun, and with it a continuation of the culture wars that had pulled America apart in the sixties, and which continue to divide the country into ever-more-hostile camps. And it is highly unlikely—if not flat out impossible—that any television series today (or, for that matter, any artifact of popular culture), could ever achieve what M*A*S*H managed to achieve: a brief moment of cultural concord.     Image Credit: "M*A*S*H Jeep" by contraption is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more

Last week, Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking celebrated its twentieth anniversary, giving me a chance to reflect on not only this writing center that I had the great privilege of founding but also on all writing centers. I remember so well arriving at Stanford in 2000 and realizing that the university did not have a writing center, though they had at one point had a very small program developed and sustained by graduate students. So Marvin Diogenes and I began advocating for such a center, arguing that we could not in good conscience implement the rhetorical curriculum we had in mind without that kind of support available to all students. I was used to proposing such things—and often being ignored. But to my delight, just about six months after my arrival, I got a call from the Vice Provost’s office asking if I could put together a proposal for a writing center since a potential donor had “expressed interest.” Could I ever! Marvin and I went into high gear, and in just a few months we had not only a proposal but a design for an on-campus center. The donors (George and Leslie Hume, for whom the Center was later named) came through and the University stepped up as well to fund the Center, which opened in fall 2001. Before the opening night, we took out a full-page ad in the campus newspaper: “Announcing a New Stanford Tradition: The Stanford Writing Center.” At the opening, the president, provost, and all the deans were present, several of them giving brief statements about the key importance of writing. And when we opened for business, we were almost overwhelmed by the numbers of students who turned up for workshops—and for tutorials. And for so much more. Soon we were sponsoring “writer’s nights,” at which students performed their writing (and during parents’ weekend performed writing with a parent!); “How I Write” events, at which professors and administrators (including our president) were interviewed about their writing practices and processes; dissertation “boot camps” that attracted more grad students than we could easily accommodate; and outreach programs to local schools. As I have often said, it was the most fun I have had in my very long career. (You can see a brief video about this history on the Center’s website here.) Now twenty years old, the Center has grown exponentially, occupies a small building of its own, and is brilliantly directed by Zandra Jordan, who received her BA from Spelman, her MA from Brown, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan; who specializes in womanist ethics, racial justice, and writing center administration; and who serves as a Chaplain Affiliate with the Office of Spiritual and Religious Life. Under Dr. Jordan’s leadership, the Center has expanded its offerings as well as its cadre of amazing tutors, who focus on writing, on speaking, and on multimedia performances. As I have traveled this country from coast to coast, Alaska to Florida, Southern California to Maine, I have seen writing centers at work, and I have been amazed at the ingenuity and perseverance of the faculty and students who work in them, often against tremendous odds and without anything like the kind of support that I found at Stanford. And I celebrate every one of these centers, with their focus on collaboration, on the social nature of writing and speaking, and on the ways in which writers and speakers can help one another. Every single day. And in so many ways. As we move slowly, slowly out of the worst of the pandemic, we need writing centers more than ever, places that will once again be there to support students in giving voice to their goals and dreams. I am so very, very grateful for writing centers, now and always! Image Credit: "writing center tutoring 5" by opacity, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

As the semester winds down, the work winds up for students and teachers. The end is within reach, and the path has suddenly become foggy. What needs to happen so that students can complete the course on time, and also grow more committed to actively invest in the challenges and joys of writing? How can I create lessons to reinforce writing as a process of discovery, and not merely the process of filling out a template?   My response at the end of the 2021-22 academic year is more circumspect than ever before. The short answer is both:  Writing can be a process of discovery, and templates might help students to conceptualize how that process might evolve. But for students the problems of how persist. How can writers narrow a topic? If writers must narrow their topics, how can they write the required number of pages for the essay? How many quotes can be used to lengthen the essay? How can this essay possibly be completed by the due date?   These questions are valid and necessary for students’ survival in college, as well as  completing the course work on time. At the same time, I grapple with my own how questions. How can I help students understand that analysis involves discovering and interpreting their own thoughts about their sources? How can I convince students to try free writing before using Google or the library databases? How can I persuade students to connect to their essay topics and to become more present in their own writing processes and products?   I don’t have easy answers to these questions, and on Tuesday I was struggling with challenges of my own. The draft of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade had just been published, and I felt frustrated and helpless. I had just turned fifteen when the Supreme Court affirmed Roe, too young to understand all of the implications but old enough to know people who were or had been unintentionally pregnant, and old enough to worry about becoming unintentionally pregnant myself. Those people were relatives and the parents of friends, people with children running up and down our block in a Midwestern suburb, people who often could not manage their own dreams and the needs of their children at the same time. It was the last thing I wanted for myself, or for anyone else.    These worries took up too much space in my brain, and only recently have I become aware of the consequences of growing up with so much space given over to fear. My hope is that no other generation will ever have to live in a world without reproductive choices, and perhaps, as a white woman, my hope seems naïve. The reality is that poor and working-class people of color seeking an abortion would be disproportionately impacted if Roe were to be declared illegal.    That Tuesday, after a day of online classes, exhausted and in need of a nap, I revised plans for the next lesson. It was close to dinner time. I knew that there was a demonstration at Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, and I also knew that my pandemic anxiety had prevented me from attending demonstrations for more than two years. I’ll go next time, I said to my partner. My partner said, but you’ll miss the first night, the first response to the news about Roe.    His words reached through the exhaustion, past the anxiety, and deep into my memory of attending the Climate March in September 2019. Carefully considering my partner’s words, I pulled on a sweater, found something green to wear, and left for the train to downtown Manhattan. At  Foley Square, alongside more than a thousand people, I listened to speeches and songs and called out new and familiar chants.  Foley Square, Downtown Manhattan May 3, 2022 Photo by Susan Bernstein As a person who is neurodivergent, I remain confused by the geography at Foley Square. Each time, I seem to find the square by accident, and afterward cannot navigate back to the subway. This time, I followed a large crowd leaving the rally, hoping that they would lead me to the train. But a mile later, the crowd kept walking, the subway signs were nowhere in sight, and my phone’s GPS wasn’t connecting to the internet. Finally, I moved to the sidewalk to ask passersby for help. The second person explained that I was only four blocks from my subway stop. In following their directions, I was moved almost to tears by the familiarity of landmarks I had longed for since the beginning of the pandemic. I knew where I was at last and found my train easily.   Is my journey to Foley Square and back a metaphor for the tensions my students face in navigating the end of spring semester? There are some comparisons, surely. The passerby’s directions to the subway were not unlike a template. At first I thought I had run far afield of my destination. However, in moving from the strange to the familiar, I could tap into prior knowledge to find the subway. This experience opened up space in my brain to feel present and connected to the geography of the moment. In walking through unfamiliar places, I discovered where I needed to go.    Of course, this process is hardly as easy as it sounds. Yet in writing this post, I hope I have gained greater empathy for the students’ situation with an unfamiliar assignment at the end of the semester. I recalled that in class the week before, we had worked collectively on creating an infographic, a kind of road map toward completion of the final writing project. Included below is the infographic, with hopes that this work leads to a plan of action for thinking through the difficult spaces. In considering the voyage of discovery to Foley Square and beyond, I can begin to grapple with students’ concerns inside and outside of the classroom.   ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Dr. Chris M. Anson. Chris is a Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University, where he is also the Director of the Campus Writing & Speaking Program.   Boot Camps and Boot Straps Four years after I taught him in a federally-funded pre-college summer program for inner-city kids who some high school teacher saw a spark in—otherwise doomed never to go to college—we crossed paths on the campus just before graduation. "Cool Chris!" he yelled—the name the students had given me in that summer writing course. "Tyrone! What's up?" We high-fived. "I got into Harvard Law!" he said with a broad smile, "and you helped, man!" A story of triumph—his, and my small piece of it. But what's wrong with us that so many live on the margins . . . and of those, with such slim chances?   Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

A few days ago, I had an opportunity to sit in on a panel discussion called “Masochists and Other Model Minorities,” sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and featuring presentations by erin Khuê Ninh (UC Santa Barbara) and Takeo Rivera (Boston U). Both of these scholars have new books out: Ninh’s Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities (Temple UP, 2021) and Rivera’s Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity (Oxford UP, 2022). Both scholars spoke of the effects of the “model minority” myth, demonstrating the power that this stereotype continues to have over many lives. Rivera focused on versions of masculinity, including an analysis of Andrew Yang, whose rhetorical choices and strategies provide an example of “model minority masochism” at work. Ninh’s book takes a deep dive into what happens to Asian American students who “pass for perfect” by pretending to enroll in college—or who enroll and then drop out but continue as if they were still students, in order to fulfill obligations to their parents. In this presentation, she described the forces that lead second-generation Asian American students to try to embody the criteria set for them—to get straight As, to attend a top elite school, and to get an advanced degree—through pretenses that she identifies as “desperate racial performances.” Both presentations were riveting, and I have ordered the books in order to read and study them thoroughly. But these presentations have already given me a chance to think more carefully and deeply about the Asian American students I am privileged to work with, and they have deepened my empathy for the struggles of so very many of the young people who sit in our classrooms, displaying what students at many schools call the “duck syndrome”: looking calm, serene, and just fine above the water, but paddling furiously and desperately underneath. In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I recommend all teachers of writing check out the work of Ninh and Rivera so that we can learn how to better support our Asian American students all year round. Image Credit: "Tattoo Fest Trophies" by GollyGforce, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

I’m as surprised as anyone that I’m launching this post with a quotation I read in Parade magazine. But the headline for Marilyn vos Savant’s “Ask Marilyn” mini-column caught my eye: “Is It Easy To Fail as a College Freshman?” Her advice struck me as distinctively unwise for a person whose fame hinges on her high I.Q. She says “roughly 40 percent” of students fail to graduate, blaming school fatigue, stress, and this kicker: “And then in college, students must study subjects in which they have no interest and will never put to use.” What? I put down my cup with enough force to splash coffee onto the newsprint. What a fixed mindset she seems to have of students. Curiosity is one of the skills we teach, after all. And what a cramped notion she has of what it means to “put to use” the myriad skills and knowledge of a liberal arts education. Those of us who teach composition appreciate the challenges and satisfactions we witness as students develop their critical thinking, empathy, logic, curiosity, research, and communication skills. Once cultivated, we put those skills “to use” in every moment of our lives. Certainly, in our writing classrooms, we also have a front-seat view of the fatigue, stress, and myriad worries students bring to campus. On our campus, and likely on yours, we are working hard to ensure students understand the value and applicability of their scholarly work, stay enrolled, succeed, and graduate. Essential to our pedagogy is explaining why a challenging subject like composition matters so much as we address the wicked challenges we face in a polarizing time of censorship debates, from school libraries to Twitter. This conversation about censorship came to our campus this spring when a bill passed by the Indiana General Assembly mandated a survey about “free speech” on college campuses. The poll, conducted by Gallup, was sent directly to students at all Indiana public universities, and leads them through a series of questions about whether they can express opinions freely in classrooms, and whether instructors expose students to scholarly ideas from different political viewpoints. Some students have reported that the survey questions imply that campus culture leans heavily and problematically to the Left. What lawmakers will do with the results of the survey are not yet clear. However, I am grateful to the guidance of my colleagues and members of our campus AAUP chapter to use the occasion of the survey as a teachable moment. My students have had rich discussions about the construction of the survey (which to many seemed biased in its language), and the implications that college students are empty vessels to be filled by indoctrinating instructors, a “banking-concept” of learning memorably coined and condemned by Paulo Freire. Frankly, my students are offended by this notion. They should be. Fundamentally, educators believe that people have the power to change. That, too, is missing from the dim view of students seemingly held by vos Savant and the writers of the “free speech” survey. Instead, I will hold in mind Rebecca Solnit’s reminder that optimism about our future rests on precisely this belief that we can change: “[W]e have to believe in the possibility of transformation — and to embrace the uncertainty it brings.” The goal of any writing course — and central to the liberal arts — is honing the rigorous critical thinking, reading, writing, and argumentative skills that liberate all of us to think freely. If that worries our legislators, we instructors should worry, too. It seems we need to keep doing more to explain to powers beyond campus the value of what we do, why we do it, and why education is essential to a healthy democracy.   Image Credit: Photo of Parade mini-column taken by the blog post’s author, April Lidinsky ... View more

  Since Firefox tracks our online activity and uses such data to recommend articles for us to read upon opening our browsers, I suppose I should be proud of the fact that my "Pocket" feed always includes a lot of Popular Science features. As I contemplate some of the clickbait (which is, after all, what such recommendations generally amount to) that has popped up even as I prepare to write this blog entry, I find not only a topic for popular-cultural-semiotic exploration but a rather disconcerting public health announcement for whoever happens to be reading these words. Let me explain. The story begins with the following "Pocket Worthy" Popular Science article "High-Fructose Corn Syrup vs. Sugar: Which Is Actually Worse?." To my surprise, the conclusion presented is that neither is worse; rather, both are bad, whether in the form of honey, or cane sugar, or too much fruit, or corn syrup, or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). What seems to have happened is that a study published in 2004 "correlated HFCS consumption with obesity rates in the U.S., which at the time were fairly closely aligned," as Sara Chodosh explains, adding, however, that the "researchers were careful to note that, as always, correlation doesn’t imply causation. Perhaps the rise of HFCS coincided with an increase in processed food consumption or simply in total calories consumed, and the shift in sugar use had nothing to do with it." But that, Chodosh continues, "didn’t stop other people, both scientists and journalists, from drawing much broader conclusions. Many parties took the paper to mean that there was something unique about HFCS that contributed to obesity. But the study never claimed to prove that, and subsequent research has shown exactly the opposite." Oh, so now they tell us. Meanwhile, at the bottom of this Pocket selection I found the following title: "The Vindication of Cheese, Butter, and Full-Fat Milk," which summarizes a study from The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, whose findings reveal "that people with higher and lower levels of dairy fats in their blood had the same rate of death during a 22-year period"—thus effectively upending decades of nutritional guidance on the consumption of full-fat dairy products. And if that isn't enough to cause one to doubt everything one ever thought one knew about healthful food consumption, further titles to be found in my Pocket feed include "Misunderstanding Orange Juice as a Health Drink" and "How Americans Got Red Meat Wrong," which I haven't bothered to read because I'm pretty much ready to give up. The semiotic takeaway from all this reminds me of that moment in Woody Allen's movie Sleeper, when Allen, as Miles Monroe, wakes up 200 years after his death and is told by a doctor to smoke a cigarette and breathe deep because tobacco is "one of the healthiest things for your body." Still, it isn't my purpose here to denounce the fickle ways of dietary research, for that is the way that science works: new studies produce results challenging earlier studies, which leads to further studies as scientists seek some approximation of the truth. Rather, what my little dive into Pocket science points up is the way that information travels in the information age. For while medical opinion (to take but one example) has always been mutable, the velocity with which fresh research is presented to the public has been exponentially increased by the advent of digital media, with online news sources competing with each other to attract the most readers with catchy headlines, who, in turn, instantly rebroadcast what they have read across an ever-growing array of social media, thereby creating an environment in which it becomes increasingly difficult to determine just what information is reliable and what isn't. All of this brings us to the even more disconcerting problem with truth itself in the information age, as "fake news!" becomes a partisan rallying cry, and hopelessly opposed ideological camps hunker down in their information silos believing only those things that they are predisposed to believe, as confirmation bias, rather than critical thinking, rules the day. Now, the very fact that this blog is, in effect, rebroadcasting dietary information without my being able to definitively attest to its accuracy (what contradicting studies might the articles be ignoring? I don't know), is an illustration of the whole situation, for with so much information being constantly generated and disseminated, even conscientious readers who investigate the reliability of their sources can run into difficulties. I am reminded here of the early CDC guidance that wearing masks were not an effective protection against COVID-19: it turns out—or so the sources of my information tell me (am I wrong?)—that this was actually a ploy to conserve the mask supply for those who most needed them at a time of critical shortages. But the unintended result was that those who didn't like masking to begin with have used this misguidance not only as an excuse to reject masks but to reject CDC guidance altogether. So to conclude this dismal tale of information age uncertainty, I will pass along the revised findings that chocolate is apparently good for you, and it doesn't cause acne. Or so I am told.   Image Credit: "ClickBaiting by Bloeise" by bloeise is marked with CC BY 2.0.   ... View more

If you haven’t read the December 2021 issue of CCC yet, be sure to check out the last piece in that issue: “Drumming a Literate Life: The Pursuit of ‘Resonant Literacy’” by Steve Lamos. Lamos, who describes himself as a “part-time drummer” and “full-time professor” of composition and rhetoric, tells readers how he came to these two professions when the rock band (American Football) he had been in reunited to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their original album, which had quietly gained quite a following: Performing as a drummer (and occasional trumpeter) who also works as a professor has required me to cultivate, enact, and attempt to refine a range of embodied literate activities related to live musical performance. . . [and] to experience what I term here ‘resonant literacy’ . . . to combine and synthesize embodied literate work as a drummer with alphabetic journaling, reflection, and theorizing . . . [and] to engage in various sorts of emergent practices and identities operating at the nexus of the sonic and the alphabetic. . . . (314) I was fascinated by Lamos’s narrative and by his discussion of resonant literacy, partially because my friendship with several writers and artists who are blind or severely vision impaired has taught me a great deal about their experience of sound and of the soundscapes they inhabit as well as about my own desire to focus more intently on soundscapes and to cultivate my own sense of resonant literacy. But also because the rise of spoken word and hip hop along with audio books and aural experiences of all kinds—not to mention years of teaching courses on graphic narratives that focused on the relationship of words, images, and sounds—have made me much more attuned to and interested in how sound and writing work together. (I’ve written before about Nicole Furlonge’s brilliant study Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature, which explores the sonic dimension of African American literature and teaches us how we might learn to “listen in print.”) Thinking back on my work with what is now the Stanford Center for Writing and Speaking, I vividly recall how much we focused on a very broad definition of “writing” as we sought to celebrate it—inviting students to perform their own work and to bring their musical instruments to play, and serving as the founding home of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective. So many of our activities in those early years in the Center brought sonic and alphabetic practices together—and today make me think of a different kind of “intersectionality” that looks carefully at the interconnections among media of expression. And I’m thinking about how teachers of writing can create opportunities for students to experience and experiment with resonant literacy. Certainly, Lamos provides provocative examples in his discussion of “emergent intensity,” “enworlded practice,” and “hybrid identity,” three “intra-actions” that “resonat[e] together to create a new sort of lively and vivacious set of literate world-making activities” that characterize both literate processes and products. My sense is that teachers of writing are already well along in thinking about such intra-actions and in embodying them in activities in and beyond their classrooms. I hope to learn about such practices in the coming months and to write more about them. In the meantime, I am imagining a new image of communication that will go way beyond the rhetorical triangle to include the increasingly important visual and aural/sonic aspects of literacy. Image Credit: "Drum Set" by grantdaws, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license ... View more

The final assignment in my first-year composition course is a multi-step rhetorical and linguistic analysis of an argument: We first read to learn about key terms used in analysis We annotate an argument together Students compose a multimodal piece to illustrate analytical terms Students annotate another argument in small groups We jointly create a thesis, outline, and sample paragraphs of an analysis essay Students annotate an article of their choosing and draft a working thesis Students draft their papers in class before attending a conference with me Students revise their work for the final portfolio   I’d like to describe how two “students” (also enrolled in a 1-credit corequisite support course) worked through this assignment.    Both students—whom I’ll call Marvel and DC—selected an essay about texting from the online collection Bad Ideas About Writing (2017). Marvel never misses class; she completed the initial steps energetically, leading her small group not only to find examples of key strategies in the text but also to discuss why those strategies made sense (or didn’t).  On the first day of individual work, Marvel arrived with a printed copy of the article with copious marginal notes and color-coded highlights.    She was also ready to talk: “It looks like the writer puts every possible counterargument in the first two pages—and if you aren’t paying attention, you actually start thinking he’s making a completely different point. Then bam—right in the middle of page two, he totally shifts and you get his real point.” I asked what she thought about this strategy. “I don’t like it. I guess I see why he did it, but he spends so much time on the evidence for the other side that it kind of weakens his argument.” A thesis was born. Marvel made a bulleted outline from her thesis and annotations.   DC, on the other hand, had a slow start. She missed class when we discussed the key analytical terms—she couldn’t find a ride that morning. I posted a recording of class online, but on the morning of our first annotation practice, she had not had a chance to watch it. In her small group, DC was told to look for examples of pronoun use that indicated the writer’s presence or the reader’s presence. I explained what that meant and gave her some examples, and then she set to work: She looked for pronouns in the argument much the way we search for Waldo, without any understanding of why she was looking. I urged her to watch the video from the class she missed. On the first individual workday, she admitted she had not yet watched the video—but she had a thesis ready: “This essay says that texting makes you a terrible writer.” The essay, of course, said exactly the opposite, but the student had not made it past the first two pages in her reading. I urged her to finish reading the essay, and then we’d identify the writer’s claim. Her own thesis for the analysis could wait.    During conference week, Marvel arrived with a full draft—a draft she herself had revised at least twice. After discussing the writer’s approach, we addressed some focus shifts in her paragraphs and talked about word choice—she tested out options to see what my reaction was to each. She left confident about her paper.   DC arrived for her conference 20 minutes late, flustered because she did not remember where my office was located. She brought no draft, but a revised thesis and detailed outline. The wording of her thesis sounded familiar:  she had taken a sample thesis from class along with an outline we created together for a different essay. Neither fit her chosen article. When I pointed this out, she answered, “That’s what the writing fellow told me to do.” (It was clear from the writing fellow’s notes that this was not the case.)   We began again to discuss options for a working thesis for the essay. She ultimately created a thesis, a reasonable outline, and a very rough draft of the essay, which was submitted in the final portfolio. “Rough” in this case means that she had not edited for conventions, and in a couple of paragraphs, she offered just a bulleted list of anticipated points. The works cited list contained only a link.   The Marvels in my classes earn As and Bs consistently, and I enjoy teaching them. Some tell me they have started to love writing again. But the DCs are much more often on my roster (not always in my classroom), struggling with transportation, internet access, lack of familiarity with academics and formal literacy. Some arrived in the US during the final two years of high school; they are still learning English.   Both Marvel and DC deserve an education; they deserve my attention, my best effort.  Marvel will earn a passing grade and move on. But what about DC?  One could say she has “earned” an F grade:  missing class, coming late, showing up unprepared. She just needs to take responsibility, right? But… she cannot access internet regularly at home.  The Wi-Fi hotspots in the campus parking lots will not help her. She is frequently late to class, at the mercy of someone who gives her a ride. While I cannot in good conscience move her to the next class, an F seems like an undeserved insult. What she needs is more time, more resources, and (perhaps) a little encouragement to continue. I would love her grade to be “making progress,” because she is. But our institutions aren’t designed with DCs in mind—we ask DCs to become Marvels in order to succeed, and we ask our corequisite faculty to make sure this transformation happens. If it doesn’t, we all get Fs.    I guess we need a superhero.      Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

  We live in disheartening times when disinformation is disseminated as if it were truth. And millions of people accept it as truth because they want to believe it. Disinformation is fueled by pathos, building on negative emotions like anger, hatred and even fear. Although pathos is an instrumental tool in argumentation, solely relying on pathos in arguments can create a skewed perception and spark horrifying (and even deadly) events like the Capitol Attack of 2021.  Recent findings by the January 6th Committee prove that the disinformation spread by Russia allowed former President Trump to breed distrust in the validity of democracy and attempt to unlawfully deny his successor his presidency. While here in America we are dealing with that truth, we see in Russia an autocrat set on denying his people the truth. President Putin has stopped the publication of reports about what is really going on in Ukraine. Hitler used the same tactic to hide the truth of what he did in Germany. At that time, it was possible to hide the facts from the world in a way that is no longer possible. Now we have social media to fill in the gaps when all journalists except those sympathetic to the Kremlin have been silenced. We have reporters on the ground in Ukraine to report firsthand on what is happening as it happens. Putin is so afraid of the truth that he wants to control the language used to describe what Russian troops are doing in Ukraine. To do so, he has imposed a fifteen-year prison sentence on those who call the attack on Ukraine what it is: a war. One Russian journalist, Maria Ovsyannikova, an editor and producer at Russian state broadcaster Channel One, was brave enough to storm her own news network during broadcasting with a sign that read "Stop the war! Don't believe propaganda! They're lying to you here!" Ovsyannikova told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, "I have been feeling a cognitive dissonance, more and more, between my beliefs and what we say on air." In a statement prepared before her protest, Ovsyannikova said, “Unfortunately, I have been working at Channel One during recent years, working on Kremlin propaganda. And now I am very ashamed. I am ashamed that I’ve allowed the lies to be said on the TV screens. I am ashamed that I let the Russian people be zombified.” Ovsyannikova was released after fourteen hours of interrogation with a small fine but could still face harsher consequences. She argues that half of the Russian people disapprove of the war in Ukraine. Another term that Russians are using to distort reality is "Nazi.” They are trying to justify their attacks on Ukrainians by saying that they are Nazis. There is no explanation of why they think that is true, but it is a term that connects the Ukrainian people with a known evil, so the use of the term is another strategy to hide the truth of what they are doing—massacring civilians. There can be no validity to any argument that is not based in truth. No conclusion is valid if it is not based on facts or inferences grounded in reality. That is, unless acceptance is based on fear or unquestioning allegiance.   Photo: "Russian TV protester opens up about stunt"  by Just Click's With A Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more