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

If you are following developments in AI technology, you may have read a long essay in The New York Times Magazine called “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” by Steven Johnson. And if you missed this article, I recommend taking time to read it. It’s a page-turner, or at least it was for me, providing a brief history of AI along the way but concentrating primarily on Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). GPT-3 is part of a “category of deep learning known as a large language model [LLM], a complex neural net that has been trained on a titanic set of text: in GPT-3’s case, roughly 700 gigabytes of data” that include Wikipedia, large collections of digitized texts, and so on. GPT-3 “learns” by essentially playing a “what’s the next word?” game trillions of times, using its database to hypothesize answers. (Johnson points out that most of us have encountered LLMs at work in apps like Gmail, with its autocomplete feature, which works on the same principle but at a much more basic level.) Most experts seem to agree that GPT-3 is not sentient—it is not (yet) thinking as a human would do. But it is demonstrating amazing abilities to generate unique answers to complex questions. For example, Johnson reports asking GPT-3 to “Write an essay discussing the role of metafiction in the work of Italo Calvino.” Here’s (the beginning of) what GPT-3 had to say: Italian author Italo Calvino is considered a master of metafiction, a genre of writing in which the author breaks the fourth wall to discuss the act of writing itself. For Calvino, metafiction is a way of exploring the nature of reality and the ways in which stories can shape our perceptions of the world. His novels often incorporate playful, labyrinthine structures that play with the boundaries between reality and fiction. In If on a winter’s night a traveler, for example, the reader is constantly interrupted by meta-level discussions of the act of reading and the nature of storytelling. . . . Johnson could give GPT-3 the same prompt over and over and get a different unique answer every time, some that may strike you as more accurate than others but “almost all. . . remarkably articulate.” As Johnson puts it, “GPT-3 is not just a digital-age book of quotations, stringing together sentences that it borrowed directly from the internet.” Rather, it has learned to generate fairly proficient arguments—ones that could seem to have been written by a fairly competent high school or first year college student—by endlessly playing that “predict the next word” game. LLMs are also gaining ground in reading comprehension, scoring about the same as an “average high school student” on exam questions similar to those on the reading section of the SAT. Johnson poses questions all writing teachers will have about LLMs: are deep learning systems capable of true human thinking and human intelligence? If so, what will that mean for teachers of writing and reading? NYU emeritus professor Gary Marcus argues, “There’s fundamentally no ‘there’ there,” noting the apparently stunning language skills of GPT-3 are just a smokescreen that obscures the lack of generative, coherent human thought and that “it doesn’t really understand the underlying ideas.” In any case, this research is of tremendous importance to those of us devoted to writing instruction and writing development. The systems now developed, for instance, can use their vast database to answer questions like “how many ingredients are in paella?” faster and more accurately than any search engine now available—and this fact could change our ways of teaching research. But they will also challenge us in new ways to deal with plagiarism, if plagiarism even continues to exist as a viable concept in terms of machine-generated text. To refer again to the Italo Calvino essay: it was written by GPT-3 in half a second. And just take a look at what GPT-3 came up with when asked to “write a paper comparing the music of Brian Eno to a dolphin,” a nonsense prompt posed by Johnson that elicited a pretty amazing “essay.” Oh, brave new world indeed! I know that many of our colleagues in writing studies are paying very close attention to AI research and development, and for them I am grateful. As always, our technical abilities outstrip our ethical understanding of them by light years. That’s only one of the reasons that scholars of rhetoric and writing need to be part of this exciting, and concerning, conversation. Image Credit: "Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence" by mikemacmarketing, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In his lecture “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” James Baldwin begins with a list of words that, for him, hold unclear meanings, words such as: artist, integrity, courage, nobility, democracy, peace, peace-loving, and warlike. He writes:  And yet one is compelled to recognize that all these imprecise words are attempts made by us all to get to something which is real and which lives behind the words. … The terrible thing is that the reality behind all these words depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day. (63)    Each time I teach Baldwin’s lecture, I try to create new lenses for reading, writing, and discussion. This process reminds me how students struggle with the long sentences, dense paragraphs, and often, as Baldwin suggests, “imprecise words” that help to make meaning for readers. Because the words are imprecise, new meaning can be derived from them each time, and so I struggle along with students to find new meaning.    In a recent semester, after listening to audio of Baldwin reading his lecture, my students found a connection that was new to many of us. In his lyrics for “Shattered Dreams,” the American rapper Earl Sweatshirt samples Baldwin’s phrase “imprecise words.” The imprecise words of the early 1960s brought immediate connection to the “terrible…reality of all these words” for the late 2010s.    Connections across generations are crucial for me in teaching and learning Baldwin’s work. Imprecise words cannot possibly encapsulate or pin down to the unspeakable realities of everyday life. “Artist’s Struggle” offers a means of connecting one’s own struggle to the suffering of others. In bearing witness to struggle and suffering, perhaps one comes to understand how imprecise words cannot possibly describe the “terrible…reality.” As Baldwin suggests, the artist’s struggle for integrity, truth, and honesty, imprecise as those words might be, “is almost our only hope” – and for Baldwin that hope is writing (67).   As our class has passed the midterm mark, I decided to try a thought experiment to learn which “imprecise words” stand out in Baldwin’s lecture, in my writing assignment about the lecture, and on students’ self-assessment of their own writing on Baldwin’s lecture. I used Data Basic.io Word Counter because, in addition to a word cloud similar to Wordle, Word Counter would give me quantitative data of how often specific words were used and the context in which the words were used. Following are the word clouds generated by Word Counter, as well as the word most often in each text. The website for quantitative data is linked after each word cloud.    “Artist’s Struggle” 3503 words Most common words: One and People, tied at 23 occurrences each  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/6257233ef83b9c09cb6ed389?submit=true    While People was used 23 times, the word does not show up in any of the phrases in the quantitative data. One occurs most often with the verbs “is” and “has.” My interpretation here is that these two words  are interchangeable. Baldwin wants to gain the support of his audience and to invest in their own struggles for integrity and truth. If the audience can bear witness to their own struggles and their own suffering, then perhaps they can also come to a stronger place of empathic action in the early 1960s struggles for Civil Rights.   Assignment for Writing Project 1, 981 words Most common word Baldwin, with 30 occurrences  https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62572437f83b9c00eab72202    Baldwin was used most frequently with “respond” and “response.” The purpose of the assignment was to offer students an opportunity to think through their interpretations of Baldwin’s work, and how Baldwin might respond to their interpretations.   A sampling of approximately 20 students’ self-assessments for Writing Project 1 7662 words The most common word is writing, with 124 occurrences https://databasic.io/en/wordcounter/results/62570d68f83b9c098ad24f9f    Writing  is used most often by students as both an adjective, as in “Writing Project,” and as a noun, “high school writing,” “college writing,” and composing writing. Students were responding to the following self-assessment prompt: Self-Assessment: At least 3 paragraphs that respond to these questions What did you learn from preparing for and composing this writing project?   What were your struggles with this writing project? What might you do similarly and differently moving forward? For example, how might journals be useful to free writing your ideas? What differences do you notice between high school and college writing?    From this prompt, it seems clear that students were using the words I provided to respond to the questions. This past academic year, I have noticed that students are asking for more explicit directions for each assignment, and are taking care to follow the directions exactly as written. My hope in teaching Baldwin is to present another view of writing, that the tools at writers’  disposal are “imprecise words.” From those “imprecise words,” Baldwin suggests, writers must attempt to struggle with integrity, to imagine themselves as artists.    In his conclusion, Baldwin asserts to the audience, “It is time to ask very hard questions and to take very rude positions. And no matter at what price” (69). Hard questions and rude positions remind me that, as a teacher, I want to do more assigning students to follow explicit directions. In fact, my hope is that students will come to question the purpose of the directions, and if the directions might not be revised to create a more inclusive atmosphere for students to grow as writers. Directions themselves are imprecise words, which is why the outcome often differs from the initial expectation. In this way, one might learn to bear witness to difference, and to  “get to something which is real and which lives behind the words.” In this way, perhaps, one can grow as a writer.     Baldwin, James. "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity." The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan, Pantheon Books, 2010, pp. 63-70.    ... View more

The following interview with Haleh Azimi and Elsbeth Mantler, Co-directors of the Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program, focuses on professional development for faculty teaching corequisite composition and was conducted via email in December of 2021. This is the fourth of four parts. David Starkey: What are some of the biggest differences between the faculty development you do at CCBC and the development you do for external audiences? Haleh Azimi: Whether we are addressing faculty development for CCBC or external audiences, we always conduct some sort of needs assessment to collect information about what is needed. Who is participating in the session? Where do they see a gap or a need for information or a conversation? This applies to external colleges that may be brand new to acceleration or internal, specific workshops, such as the remote synchronous workshop mentioned earlier. We always try to ground our workshops in data and research, while also providing practical and tangible examples for practitioners to use. DS: And what do you teach that practitioners really seem to love? HA: It’s really exciting to work with external practitioners when we are sharing our ready-to-use thematic units, which are essentially our fully developed teaching materials. These materials include all scaffolded activities, including readings, writing prompts, and any alternative activities. Sharing this with other practitioners helps them conceptualize the way we approach our students through our curriculum. In our program, we are fortunate enough to have a bank of ready-to-use culturally relevant thematic teaching units for faculty to use. This is especially helpful for adjunct faculty who may not have the time to create a brand new curriculum every semester. DS: I imagine that you’re also working with multiple stakeholders when you’re doing professional development. HA: We typically host faculty and those in student development, such as advisors and the registrar. Deans and others in senior-level leadership positions, such as provosts, also attend external consultations. We think it is important that all stakeholders have a working knowledge of the program—especially when they are new to institutionalizing ALP. DS: If you had unlimited resources, what would your ideal faculty professional development program for ALP look like? Elsbeth Mantler: What would be really cool is if we had an opportunity to provide a true learning community for faculty involved with ALP so that we could dig deep, be collaborative, and share ideas. Teaching can be isolating, especially during the pandemic. There is also a lot of emotional stress that can come with working so closely with students especially since we really emphasize addressing non-cognitive needs. In my courses, especially since the pandemic, I always start classes with a brief and informal check-in with my students. For example, prior to finals week, I’ll say something like, “Hi, everyone! This could be a stressful time as you prepare for exams in your other classes. Is there anything that is causing you to not be able to do your schoolwork? You can share openly or grab me privately if you would like….” I say things like this and frontload these sorts of comments at the start of each class to build community with my students. They share their comments with their classmates, and I create an environment where students know they can come to me for support. I also work to build in student voices during these informal check-ins. My students have a wealth of knowledge and experiences. The peer-to-peer input is often more useful than what I can offer to them. I want students to know that they can connect with me and with each other. Sometimes students share very difficult issues with me, such as homelessness, food insecurity, and mental health struggles. DS: Students’ struggles can also weigh heavily on their instructors. EM: Faculty really need each other to share the burden of issues like these sometimes. Building a strong community that meets often would help faculty feel connected. HA: Elsbeth and I also would love to see an increase in monetary support for ALP adjunct faculty involvement with PD sessions. ALP is truly a unique program. The configuration and concentrated effort to meet students’ non-cognitive needs are areas that require significant professional development, and we want to support adjunct faculty for their time and commitment. We both started as adjunct faculty working multiple jobs. We understand how thinly stretched people are, so allocating a significant amount of resources toward adjunct faculty involvement in PD is something we both find important.   DS: Wow, I learned a lot! Thanks to both of you for taking time out of your extremely busy schedules to talk with me. HA: Thanks so much for the opportunity to share! EM: I've enjoyed the conversation! Thanks. ... View more

Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Jennifer Gray, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at the College of Coastal Georgia.   Video Conference The student requested a video conference on Easter Sunday at 4pm. I said yes, because it was what he selected. I grumbled privately, as it was the only day without something work-related scheduled. I left celebrations at my neighbor’s house, much to our dismay, and logged in, expecting a blank black box. Instead, there he was, with a smile, a Zoom wave, and his Walmart uniform and nametag, calling from the front seat of his car on his break during his shift on a holiday. We talked about our assignment. He revised his citing practices, and I revised my negativities.     Submit your own Tiny Teaching Story to tinyteachingstories@macmillan.com! See the Tiny Teaching Stories Launch for submission details and guidelines. ... View more

Chris Rock's calamitous misfire at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony wasn't the only joke to run off the rails during that now epic evening—though it was, of course, the most consequential. But there was another gag, performed by Oscars co-host Amy Schumer, that also raised a bit of a ruckus when Schumer stepped out into the front row seats (well, tables) and pretended to mistake Best Supporting Actress nominee Kirsten Dunst for a "seat filler" while bantering with her partner Jesse Plemons, who was also present as a Best Supporting Actor nominee. Dunst fans erupted in such fury over this "insult" that Schumer felt obliged to explain that it was all a kind of skit that had been "choreographed" in advance with both Plemons's and Dunst's knowledge and cooperation, which settled the matter amicably.  But from a cultural-semiotic perspective, there is a lot more to the story than the uproar it briefly inaugurated, a significance that goes to the heart of one of America's most cherished cultural mythologies. This mythology is reflected in the belief that America, due to a history of social mobility as enshrined most powerfully in the American dream, is effectively a classless society. Of course, Americans know perfectly well that America is structured along class lines, but they tend to believe that class identity is not fixed at birth and that anyone can move up the social ladder—which is one reason why many middle and working-class Americans oppose increasing taxes on the very rich: they hope to "arrive" there themselves some day. And this takes us to the Schumer/Dunst/Plemons skit, because the whole point of the joke was entirely at the expense of those plebian "seat fillers" who are hired to keep the chairs of Academy members filled when those honored few go off to take a bathroom break. So when Plemons told Schumer that Dunst was his "wife," Schumer's punch line—"You’re married to that seat filler?"—expressed disbelief that a member of Hollywood royalty could possibly be married to a commoner. This was expected to be funny, but the uproar that followed was motivated not by the actual insult to commoners but by the perceived insult to an upper-class actress who failed to be recognized for who she was. Thus, while the incident itself was trivial, what it reveals is not, because if Americans are ever going to understand just what is tearing their country apart at the seams these days, their inattention to, even denial of, America's social class divisions will deprive them of an essential insight into what is going so badly wrong.   Image Credit: "Red carpet at 81st Academy Awards in Kodak Theatre" by Greg in Hollywood (Greg Hernandez) is marked with CC BY 2.0. ... View more