I’ve taken to asking my students to recommend best teaching practices from their experiences to date, Zooming their way to the B.A. So far, I haven’t heard anything that will work for me. A colleague starts class with a 10-minute focused breathing exercise. Another with everyone taking turns sharing what they feel grateful for that day. I am happy that these opening moves help them feel more grounded and present. I just can’t seem to add them to the proverbial toolbelt.   Instead, I started with the approach I used when my students and I were in the same room and modified it for our current situation. Back in the Before Times, my students would spend the first 10 minutes in class responding to five short-answer questions about that day’s reading and an extra-credit question inviting them to share whatever independent research they’d done for that day’s reading. Not exactly stress-free writing, but maybe stress-lite: I never ask trick questions or focus in on obscure details, so the students who’ve done the reading do well and those who haven’t don’t. Once the quizzes are handed in, the students have spent 10 minutes thinking about that day’s reading and we’re all in the same headspace and discussion takes off.   Now, I’m beginning my classes with a writing prompt about the day’s reading. I make the prompt available 10 minutes *before* class starts and have the assignment due 11 minutes *after* class begins. This allows students who have unreliable internet or test anxiety or are composing on a phone extra time; but I let all the students start whenever they choose. I assure them that I’m only assessing their responses on the assumption that they’ve had 10 minutes. So, super long responses aren’t more likely to get better scores than briefer responses.   My LMS has a toggle for a rubric, which I duly completed, but then I discovered that the grading rubrics are not shared with the students! It’s not even an option. The mystification of standards mandated by the digital platform.   I want my students to know how I’m scoring them and I want my scoring system to reflect the kind of thinking I’m looking for in their writing. Here’s the rubric I shared with my 1st year class:   *   A Mind at Work on a Problem   My prompts are meant to invite you to share your steady engagement with the texts we’re reading. What has the assignment caused you to think about? What independent research has it led you to pursue? What connections have you made--to other parts in the text; to our class discussions; to your other classes; to your own interests? So, what does that translate to in terms of assessment? I start at 7 and grade up. When I hit repeated significant grammatical errors, I start to grade down. 7: Did the reading. Tends towards summary and description. Might also have one or two significant grammatical errors. 8: Analytical. Considers what a passage means or might mean. Engages with the text. This can take many forms: evidences meaningful research into a term or phrase; works through a moment of difficulty; makes a connection to class discussion or earlier passages or the student's own earlier writing. 9: Interpretive. Takes on a significant challenge. This can take many forms: unpacks an unfamiliar term or works through a particularly thorny stretch of prose; offers contextual information for the purposes of clarifying or complicating an interpretation; contends with a multiplicity of meanings. 10: Like 9, but the work is more ambitious and/or more consequential. This can mean drawing insights that stretch back to earlier moments in the text or it can mean drilling down into the local complexities of the term or passage or event chosen. Includes evidence of self-initiated research. Serious grammatical errors will bring down scores, as will failures to spellcheck. As results come in, I will share responses with you so that we can discuss what writing that demonstrates a mind at work on a problem looks like and does.   *   I’m happier with this change than I expected to be. So far, the students’ responses to the prompts have been longer, more detailed, and more nuanced than I anticipated them to be at this point in the semester. And the class discussions are, in some ways, even better than they were when we were all meeting in the same space. It’s early days, of course, but it’s clear to me that many of the students feel much more confident speaking via camera in familiar surroundings than they do in class speaking into the back of the heads of the students in front of them. ... View more

*As you may have noticed from the title of this post, the name of one of the characters has been altered throughout this blog. This is due to the profanity filter on the Macmillan Learning Community Site, which flagged and filtered his name. To avoid this issue, I've taken some creative license. Well, we managed to have an election after all, so in the spirit of a little decompression I thought I'd tackle something a little lighter for this blog—which isn't easy in the face of an ongoing pandemic amidst a society that appears to be unraveling. So when, while searching for something else I happened upon a book called Growing Up with D-ck and Jane (1996) and, glancing through it, found something semiotically interesting that I didn't expect to find there, I thought that here was an opportunity for a simple and rather upbeat analysis. But upon further exploration, I find that the thing isn't quite so simple after all—which makes it at once more interesting but less upbeat. Let me explain. For those unaware or too young to remember them, D-ck and Jane are the two main characters (along with younger sister Sally) of a series of basal readers used to teach children to read, whose popularity peaked in the 1950s. I wish to make it clear that I am fully aware of the naivete inherent in D-ck and Jane's notoriously sanitized promotion of suburban middle-class mores. Indeed, by the mid-sixties D-ck, Jane, and the whole happy crew had become such a laughing stock to my generation that now that I am in my mid-sixties I am hardly about to get nostalgic about them. No, that isn't what this blog is about. Rather, the thing that struck me as I paged through the text was the reproduction of an old D-ck-and-Jane narrative set in a toy store, wherein Sally, then Jane, then D-ck, all express a desire for a certain toy, only to be reminded by the others that they already have something like it at home. Each time this happens (and then one last time for good measure in chorus) the children renounce their desire for the new toy and pledge themselves to being content with the toys they have. Corny? Yes, of course it's corny: D-ck and Jane are the epitome of corniness. But that isn't the semiotic point. The corniness is something I expected; what I didn't expect was a homily against what Laurence Shames calls "the hunger for more"—certainly not from an era when America was being aggressively transformed by the mass media into a consumer society. After all, this was the time when television began its ongoing campaign to train children to become lifelong, brand-loyal consumers (collect the whole set!). So I was pleasantly surprised to find in this little morality play a promotion of contentment with the things one already has. Think of it! D-ck and Jane going against the grain! But alas, here is where things get complicated—indeed, self-deconstructing. For when I plopped down Growing Up with D-ck and Jane next to my computer in order to write this blog, I found in a flap attached to the book's cover a little booklet entitled Fun with D-ck and Jane: A Commemorative Collection of Stories, which just happens to contain a counter-story of how Jane once came to be given three talking baby dolls for her birthday, and happily embraces all of them. But wait, in the homily I've briefly described above Jane is persuaded not to covet a talking baby doll when she already has two dolls at home! Surely then, when three dolls show up as she opens her presents, the story might have resolved itself otherwise than with Jane's ending up a whole "family" of them. Well, perhaps I'm not being fair. After all, Jane doesn't ask for the dolls herself in the story: D-ck and Sally tip the wink to Father and Mother for her (it isn't clear how a third doll comes into the picture, however). So Jane isn't herself being greedy, and perhaps the message here is that Jane's birthday "triplets" foreshadow (and condition) her future role as a wife and mother—which is a whole different analysis. Still, my discovery of this second story did change the trajectory of my essay, prompting me to note, first, that it always pays to research one's subject carefully before committing to a semiotic interpretation of it, and second, that in a consumer society you can never really get away from consumption. After all, Jane’s happiness with her inadvertent windfall of talking dolls in the second story suggests that more is better. This sort of well-nigh inevitable contradiction is something to keep your students on the lookout for as they conduct their semiotic analyses of American popular culture. For even The Simpsons (which could be seen as a parody of the whole D-ck-and-Jane universe), can contradict its own anti-consumerist ethos. I'm reminded here of the famous collaboration with Banksy, which, while sending up the exploitation of Third World workers who produce Simpsons paraphernalia, effectively commodifies the dissent (in Thomas Frank's words) of viewers whose attraction to the show draws in the commercial sponsors whose advertising dollars reproduce the very conditions that The Simpsons satirizes. You can't escape. Look, Lisa, see Bart! See Bart cash in!   "Fun With D-ck And Jane" by Roadtrip-'62 is used under a CC0 1.0 license. ... View more

  Over the last few years, I’ve written and spoken often about the power of stories, about why we “need” stories, and about how the stories we create can lead to narrative justice. In short, the stories we tell shape realities, and so stories that continually represent a group of people in negative ways create injustice for the people in that group. It’s our obligation to resist and replace such stories. (This is the major point of a talk I gave at the 50th anniversary of the RSA, which you can read here.) As I was doing research on stories and storytelling, I was thinking a lot about the speaker, the teller of the stories, and about how to create just stories. But it takes (at least) two for stories to work, and so lately I’ve been thinking about the hearers of stories, the listeners, and about listening in general. Krista Ratcliffe has been teaching us about the importance of listening for over twenty years now, and her lessons have never been more germane than they are today in an age of echo chambers and of stories that can reach millions in seconds and reiterate them endlessly. So it was with particular interest that I read about the work of Professor Uri Hasson and his colleagues at Princeton who have been studying stories and the connection between speakers and listeners. During experiments using brain scans, these researchers noted that in certain narrative circumstances the sound waves of a story “couple” the brain responses of the speaker and the listener. As TED Conferences puts it, “a great storyteller literally causes the neurons of an audience to closely sync with the storyteller’s brain.” That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it gets at Hasson’s finding that our brains have evolved to develop a “neural protocol that allows us to use such brain coupling to share information.” In a series of fascinating experiments, Hasson and his colleagues had speakers narrate text to listeners in various ways: read backwards or out of order, and so on. While these experiments led to some surface-level coupling, only the story, its narrative elements intact, led to coupling deep inside the brain. Furthermore, Hasson found that “the better the listener’s understanding of the speaker’s story, the stronger the similarity” between the two brains. In rhetorical or compositional terms, Hasson’s findings demonstrate that effective, meaningful communication depends on establishing common ground. The current climate of distrust and division, of viral misinformation repeated endlessly, makes finding common ground increasingly difficult if not impossible. When listeners hear the same thing over and over again, day in and day out, they will have trouble “synching” with anyone telling a different story. The message for us as teachers of writing seems clear: we must work harder than ever to engage students in listening to and understanding stories and perspectives they are not familiar with or that differ significantly from their own. When novelist Richard Powers points out that the only thing in the world that can change a person’s mind is “a good story,” he now has neuroscientific evidence to back him up! Stay tuned for more on listening in the coming weeks. Image Credit: "Orange and Blue Brain Anatomy Hoop Art. Hand Embroidered." by Hey Paul Studios, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Nancy Sommers (@nancy_sommers), author of Writer's Reference, Rules for Writers with 2020 APA Update, Pocket Style Manual, and Bedford Handbook with 2020 APA Update, identifies the need to hone in on the best online teaching tools to deliver knowledge and streamline teaching. With so many possibilities (Zoom, breakout rooms, chats, polls, message and discussion boards, Google docs, Canvas, and more), how do you streamline your toolkit to find and deliver the most important essence of your lesson plan? ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Nancy Sommers (@nancy_sommers), author of Writer's Reference, Rules for Writers with 2020 APA Update, Pocket Style Manual, and Bedford Handbook with 2020 APA Update, delves into recreating the same sense of community from in-person classrooms in online teaching, and using music to break the ice and ease into class.  ... View more

This blog series is written by Julia Domenicucci, an editor at Macmillan Learning, in conjunction with Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.   To kick off the new year—and a new semester—this blog post will look at suggested Grammar Girl podcasts within Achieve for English products. While both English LaunchPads and Achieves include collections of assignable, ad-free Grammar Girl podcasts, this post will focus specifically on Achieve. If you are not currently using Achieve but are interested in learning more about it, please visit the Macmillan Learning catalog or speak with your sales representative.  If you are using LaunchPad or are just looking for assignment ideas, be sure to check out the other Grammar Girl blog posts from the Bits Blog. Recent blog posts include: Using Grammar Girl Podcasts in an Online Classroom Grammar Girl & Ideas for Teaching Online Using Grammar Girl Podcasts for Fun, Low-Stakes Activities Using Grammar Girl Podcasts with Literature & Fiction Using Grammar Girl Podcasts to Reflect on Writing & Accomplishments   How to Find the Suggested Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products Starting with copyright 2021, Achieve for English products contain a folder of 25 suggested Grammar Girl podcasts. These are easy to add to your course and can be used in a variety of ways!  If you are using a pre-built course: Many pre-built courses include the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” toward the top of the Course Content list. (See “Start with a Pre-built course” for more about the pre-built course option.) If you are building a course from scratch or your title does not include the folder in the pre-built: Look for the folder “Grammar Girl: 25 Suggested Podcasts” toward the top of your Resources list. You can add one or more podcasts to your course as you would any other piece of content from Resources. If you wish to add all 25 podcasts, consider creating the suggested folder structure you see in the Resources for your own course. (See “Add Resources to your course” for help.) By default, the 25 suggested Grammar Girl podcasts will be visible to your students once they are added to your Course Content. You can change the default settings depending on how you wish to use them in your course. If you make no changes, and have all 25 podcasts in your Course Content, students will be able to browse and listen to the podcasts as they wish. In the default organization, the 25 suggested podcasts appear in sub-folders that cover Style and Word Choice, Logic and Argument, Common Grammar Issues, and Common Punctuation Topics. Style and Word Choice Grammar Girl Podcast: Affect versus Effect Grammar Girl Podcast: Bad versus Badly Grammar Girl Podcast: Parallel Structure: Patterns Are Pleasing Grammar Girl Podcast: The Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation Grammar Girl Podcast: Well versus Good Grammar Girl Podcast: Which versus That Grammar Girl Podcast: Who versus Whom Logic and Argument Grammar Girl Podcast: Begs the Question Grammar Girl Podcast: What Is a Straw Man Argument? Common Grammar Issues Grammar Girl Podcast: A versus An Grammar Girl Podcast: Active Voice and Passive Voice Grammar Girl Podcast: Adverbs Ending in -ly Grammar Girl Podcast: Articles and Determiners before Nouns Grammar Girl Podcast: Comparatives versus Superlatives Grammar Girl Podcast: It Is I versus It Is Me Grammar Girl Podcast: Just between You and Me Grammar Girl Podcast: Misplaced Modifiers Grammar Girl Podcast: Only: The Most Troublesome Misplaced Modifier Grammar Girl Podcast: Sentence Fragments Grammar Girl Podcast: Top Ten Grammar Myths Common Punctuation Topics Grammar Girl Podcast: A Common Comma Error: The Comma Splice Grammar Girl Podcast: Serial Comma Grammar Girl Podcast: When to Use an Apostrophe Grammar Girl Podcast: Where Do I Use Commas? Grammar Girl Podcast: Your versus You're       Ideas for Using the 25 Suggested Podcasts Use them as is: Include all 25 podcasts in their default structure. Do not assign them, and leave them all visible. Tell your students about the resource and let them know they can browse the podcasts if they wish to or if they are looking for additional support. Integrate them into your course structure: Move podcasts into folders for specific chapters or weeks, depending on how you have set up your course. Consider if you wish to integrate all 25 or a smaller selection. Assign some or all of the podcasts: You can assign some or all of the podcasts to your students. This allows you to add a due date for students to listen to the podcast by. You can assign items for points (use the Graded or Extra Credit options) or not (use Ungraded). See “Assign an item or change assignment settings” for more information on assigning items in Achieve.   How to Find All Grammar Girl Podcasts in Achieve for English Products Achieve for English products contain more than just 25 Grammar Girl products, however! If you want to explore the full collection, add more podcasts to the suggested 25, or are using an Achieve from before copyright 2021, follow the steps on the support page "Add Grammar Girl and shared English content to your course" or look for the "Quick Start Guide: Grammar Girl and Question Bank" in your Welcome Unit.   If you have used or plan to use Grammar Girl podcasts in Achieve, we would love to hear about it! Leave a comment with how you’re using these podcasts in your teaching.   Credit: "reading ipad with headphones on" by cclogg is marked with CC0 1.0 ... View more

Last week I suggested an assignment inviting students to analyze President Biden’s Inaugural Address, working in small groups to examine various aspects of it—from structure to word choice to allusions and sources—and then come together to share their findings and to discuss, as a group, the values they find underlying the words. I hope some of you carried out this assignment with your students—or if not, that you will consider doing so soon. If so, you might assign one group to do nothing but an analysis of pronouns used. The speech itself clocks in at 2,350 words. I’ve just reread it and by my rough count, Biden uses the first person plural pronoun “we” 86 times—so roughly 3.7% of his words. If students count occurrences of “our” and “us,” the percentage of words invoking togetherness will be even higher. Then check the number of uses of “I” and “my” —some of which refer not to Biden but as quotations of what other Americans might say—along with the number of references to “you.” Finally, count uses of “they” and “them,” which I expect will be a low number/percentage, as would befit a speech that seeks not to divide into “us” and “them.” What conclusions can your students draw from this analysis of pronoun use? How does Biden’s use of pronouns underscore and support the appeals he is making to Americans? What does the repetition of the pronouns—like a drumbeat in some sections—do to emphasize those appeals? Do students find places where Biden might have used a pronoun but did not, and what do they make of that choice? Are there points in the speech where they might suggest revision based on their analysis?   In short, I think it’s worth taking a very close look at Biden’s example of epideictic rhetoric at work—especially since we will have to wait another four years for such an occasion to arise again. You can find the White House’s transcript of the address here. Image Credit: "Presidential Inaugural Parade [Image 11 of 11]" by DVIDSHUB, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Richard Miller (@richard_miller), author of Habits of the Creative Mind, discusses the pedagogical changes he's made to his courses and his writing assignments to account for online instruction and the reality of the COVID pandemic. His philosophy? Driving engagement and connection - with ideas, with current events, and with each other.  ... View more

In today's "What We've Learned" video, Douglas Downs, one of the authors of Writing about Writing, discusses how online instruction can exacerbate the challenges students face in tracking where they are in a class - what assignments are due, what they need to read or know, and where they can locate the materials they need.   ... View more

  Today’s guest blogger is Tanya Rodrigue‌, an associate professor in English and coordinator of the Writing Intensive Curriculum Program at Salem State University in Massachusetts.   The pandemic has thrown instructors into foreign teaching territory, prompting many to question how to employ familiar pedagogical practices in an online environment.  While preparing to teach online for the first time last year, I had many questions about peer review: how do I foster productive online peer review sessions? How do I teach students how to give each other productive feedback? How do I support them in taking up peer feedback and using it to revise their writing? I also had questions about logistics: which platform or program would be most conducive for peer review? What is the best way for students to “exchange” papers? What role should I play during peer review? In efforts to answer these questions, I spent a lot of time reading and researching about effective online teaching practices and different approaches to peer review. I found CCCC’s “A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction,” a particularly helpful list of guiding principles for online writing pedagogy. The fourth principle reads: “appropriate onsite composition theories, pedagogies, and strategies should be migrated and adapted to the online instructional environment.” While this principle isn’t pedagogically earth-shattering, it was a helpful reminder that I didn’t have to abandon my familiar face-to-face pedagogical practices. I simply had to reimagine them.   After some thinking and experimenting with peer review in classes early on in the semester, I recognized that I could migrate and adapt my familiar scaffolded pedagogical approach for teaching to an online environment and rework some peer review activities that were proven to be effective in my face-to-face classes. Below I offer a five-step online peer review approach with resources and pedagogical practices instructors might use for each step.   Step #1: Teach students what peer review is, what it does, how to do it, and why it’s valuable. Research as well as anecdotal pedagogical evidence tells us that students need direct instruction in learning what peer review is and how to do it. Direct instruction is needed to avoid unproductive comments (“I like this”) or comments that solely focus on grammar (“you need a comma here”). Some resources that work well for initiating conversation about peer review are: No One Writes Alone: A Guide for Students University of Minnesota, Peer Review: What is Peer Review After students engage with one of these resources, it is helpful to facilitate a discussion—either on Zoom or a discussion board—to review video content and to further provide students with ways to provide productive comments on particular assignments.   Step #2: Teach students what constitutes “good” writing for any given assignment. Every assignment calls for a different genre of writing, and every genre within every writing situation invites particular rhetorical moves, specific format, and particular content. It is our job as instructors to help students understand the criteria needed to successfully communicate in writing in each assignment. Just like a face-to-face classroom, we can do this in a number of ways in an online environment: Make assignments detailed and transparent Provide specific criteria for each writing assignment and descriptions of what makes particular criteria successful, either in a rubric or detailed guidelines Provide students with examples of the kind of writing they are being asked to do Determine the kind of peer review activity that would make the most sense in your context to guide students in identifying signs of success in writing   Step #3: Choose an online platform to facilitate peer review based on the advantages and drawbacks of the platform. There are a plethora of online platforms for peer review such as Canvas, Blackboard, Google, Flipgrid, Zoom, Voicethread, and Macmillan’s very own Achieve Writing Tools. Make a list of the advantages and drawbacks of each program to determine the most appropriate platform for your context. For example, Achieve Writing Tools has several advantages. The program enables instructors to assign peer review partners/groups. They are also able to moderate the peer review process through engagement with a summary report that identifies students’ peer review comments. Instructors can comment directly on students’ peer review responses in efforts to help them become stronger reviewers and in turn writers.   Step #4: Choose a peer review activity that best suits the needs of the assignment and your students. Instructors may consider a structured approach, like a list in which peer reviewers respond, or a flexible approach, like an invitation for peer reviewers to identify three strengths and weaknesses of a paper.    Step #5: Make students accountable for providing and using peer feedback for revisions. Instructors may consider assigning a grade weight to the peer review responses and/or assigning a revision plan that asks students to identify what and how they will take up peer feedback to revise their writing. A revision plan activates students’ metacognitive awareness, enabling them to have a stronger understanding of the value of the writing process as well as their own writing habits and practices.   When facilitating online peer review, I’ve found it helpful to ask students to report back on their experience with the scaffolded approach and the activity chosen for each assignment. Their responses, especially in an asynchronous class, have been invaluable in my quest to dwell more comfortably in the foreign world of online instruction. ... View more

It's a long way from "Helter Skelter" to "Back Off Boogaloo," but in the wake of the recent attack on the U.S. Capitol and the looming danger of more such assaults to come*, I find myself thinking about the role of rock-and-roll in the current right-wing/populist insurgency. For while the semiotic significance of the situation may appear to be disconcertedly paradoxical, it merits some serious attention as we face a menacing future. Of course, neither Paul McCartney—whose whimsical exercise in down-and-dirty rock would become the Manson Family theme song—nor Ringo Starr—whose possible** jab at Paul McCartney has been transmogrified into a code name for a white-supremacist uprising—could ever have imagined that their music would inspire maniacal violence. But then, Bob Dylan didn't mean to provide the Weathermen with their nom de guerre, either. The point is that rock-and-roll has a history of flirting with defiance, with revolution, and even with violence. This flirtation became engrained in the rock ethos in the 1960s when the Rolling Stones, seeking to distinguish themselves from Epstein's adorable mop tops, decided to become the bad asses of the British Invasion. But their pose as tough guys ("Play with Fire"), revolutionaries ("Street Fighting Man"), and Satanists ("Sympathy for the Devil"), made them icons of the Cultural Revolution, not fascism. How disconcerting it must be for them today to find that "Play With Fire" and "Sympathy for the Devil" are part of the Spotify playlist for Trump rallies***—along with Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World," John Fogarty's "Fortunate Son," Michael Jackson's "Beat It," and The Village People's "Macho Man." Just how the much-celebrated "attitude" of rock, its theatricalized opposition to the establishment, law-and-order, and any form of authority, came to be appropriated by the alt-right—the Boogaloo Boys and their ilk, with their fantasies of a "Boogaloo" uprising against everyone to the left of Donald Trump—is one of the paradoxes of popular cultural history. But there you have it: rock-and-roll, in its doddering (if not toothless) old age, is showing up in a new revolution, with classic tracks joining the obscure underground of Nazi Punk and National Socialist black metal as the playlist for a violent overthrow of society. But then, perhaps it isn't so paradoxical. For when rock-and-roll began to play with the fire of revolution, it opened the door to violence, and violence comes in all flavors. Even John Lennon was worried about the consequences, voicing his concerns in his notoriously ambiguous (if not ambivalent) anthem "Revolution" in an apparent effort to put the brakes on something for which he seems to have felt some responsibility. I'm reminded by all this of Horkheimer and Adorno's bitter condemnation of the movie industry in their Dialectic of Enlightenment—their insistence that, due to the appropriation of the cinema by European fascism, the movies themselves were politically suspect. But that, I think, went too far. The medium is not the message here. Rather, the message is that nothing can be taken for granted. Things can be turned upside down. The rock-and-roll revolution can swing right just as well as it can swing left, and, sometimes, lawful authority can be our friend. Because as we anxiously await a presidential inauguration fraught with menace and foreboding, we cannot escape the irony that we (I am using this pronoun to include everyone who wants to see Joe Biden and Kamala Harris safely inaugurated) must rely now on some of the most traditional agents of armed authority in the playbook—the police, the National Guard, and (who knows?) the Army (not to mention the Constitution and the Supreme Court)—to protect our liberties. And that's not rock-and-roll. Photo Credit: "Guitar" by blondinrikard is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

Yesterday, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States. In spite of claims of election rigging and fraud, none of it backed by evidence; in spite of a deadly riot aimed at overturning the results of the election; and in spite of a raging pandemic that has claimed close to 400,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, it looks like a peaceful transfer of power has taken place and we have a new president—and a new vice president, the first Black woman and Asian American to hold that position. The opportunity to deliver an inaugural address only comes around once in four years, so it’s no wonder that such speeches are usually scrupulously and carefully crafted beforehand and pored over afterward as a way to understand what the next four years may hold. From George Washington’s first inaugural address in 1789 (during which he urged the Congress to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution) to Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address (1861) in which he sought to appease the southern, slave-holding states and avoid civil war and his second inaugural address (1865) in which he condemned the evil of slavery while calling for “malice toward none and charity for all,”  seeking to “bind up the nation’s wounds”—well, I could go on and on, noting the best and worst inaugurals, the shortest and longest, the most and least important. In fact, I’ve just read a number of inaugural addresses, including those by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. And what a range they represent—all food for thought as well as material for rhetorical analysis. So for this week of the Biden inauguration, teachers of writing have an opportunity to engage students in just such an analysis. Students could choose an inaugural address to analyze individually; pairs of students could choose pairs of addresses to submit to comparative analysis; or teams of students could conduct an analysis of one particular address. This week, my choice would be to ask students first to listen to Biden’s inaugural address—listen to it very carefully, taking in not only his words but his body language and facial expressions along with the context surrounding him—and to make notes on their overall impression of the address, listing what was most uplifting and memorable along with what they wished they had heard but did not, how they responded to the address, etc. Then ask students to read the address together with two or four other students (so groups of 3 or 5), bringing to bear the notes they took after listening and going sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to discuss the ideas. And then, staying with the same group, work in teams to analyze the address: one team would analyze the structure of the speech, outlining its parts, noting transitions and linkages from point to point; another team would analyze the opening (exordium) and conclusion (peroration), looking for echoes between the two, for the most memorable words and lines, and especially for how the President chose to conclude these remarks; a third team would examine the use of metaphors and similes and other figures of speech (did Biden echo Kennedy’s use of chiasmus or use metaphor as Reagan did in referring to America as a “shining city on a hill”?) and use of stories or anecdotes; a fourth team would identify two or three major points in the address and the evidence offered in support of those points; and a fifth would make a list of the sources Biden calls on and point out the effect they are intended to have on the audience (all of us). You may well think of other questions to ask and other goals for teams to pursue: what can a team discover about audience reaction to the address? What effect did the heavy military and police presence have on the address? Finally, the teams should draw some conclusions about how the inaugural address worked and how well it worked, and especially about what values, assumptions, and expectations are embedded in the address—all based on their findings. In my class, I would want to call students’ attention to the three kinds of speeches the ancient rhetors identified—judicial, deliberative, and epideictic. Almost all inaugural addresses fall into the category of epideictic (that is, devoted to praise and/or blame), but it is very interesting, and telling, to note whether a particular president leans more toward praise or blame and why. What mark did Biden put on his use of praise and blame? I think such analysis will make for lively and interested and—most of all—informed discussion of this particular inaugural address: students will have gathered data and used that data to draw conclusions, rather than simply airing their personal responses to the address, or to Biden in general. And that, after all, is one of the major goals of rhetorical analysis: to provide a range of strategies for engaging with and understanding and eventually evaluating the events—and words—that work to shape our lives. Image Credit: "Marines support 57th Presidential Inauguration" by DVIDSHUB, used under a CC BY 2.0 license ... View more

Gee, it turns out that adding a constitutional crisis to a pandemic makes it extra difficult to plan spring courses. Who knew? I hope we take comfort in being part of a compassionate teaching community, and that together we can help our students who face this difficult moment with fewer life skills than most of their instructors. Students can bring out the best in us, and this is a semester to kindle that compassion—for their sakes and for ours.  So, how might we all make this a compassionate semester? Many universities are skipping spring break, but our faculty voted for seeding in three “Wellness Days” throughout the semester, to offer mini breaks for students and faculty. On those days, there are no synchronous classes or due dates; these are “breather” days that I imagine will be as welcome to me as to my students as we pull toward springtime, wider-spread vaccinations, and recovery from political trauma. If your institution hasn’t made a similar move, you might build compassionate breather days into your syllabus. I’m also offering my students the assurance that they’ll control key aspects of their assessment, which I’ve written about before. Anticipating student fatigue, I’m dreaming up creative assignments, as fun “and now for something completely different” experiences, to keep us afloat. For example, in one class, students will collectively write and perform some manifestos as a break from analyzing texts from the genre—and they’ll learn a lot about the genre in the process. For those creative assignments, particularly, I want students to feel free to play and experiment and reflect on the experience, and I want to release them from the worrying specter of instructor judgment. Why not have fun while nurturing the life skill of self-reflection? Grades aren’t forever, after all, but self-assessment and self-evaluation are (says the writer whose annual report is due quite soon). In this recent Inside Higher Ed piece, Madeline Grimm explains the (il)logic that grades incentivize learning. Often, the opposite is the case. This final (we hope?) pandemic semester is a good time to try out the elements of “ungrading” that are part of a building pedagogical wave. We empower our students when we collaborate with them on learning objectives. We help them focus on learning as a transferrable process when we give them time for metacognition. As Grimm notes, “An abundance of research shows the importance of metacognition in academic success, namely the ability to monitor one’s learning process and plan steps for improvement.” What could that look like for you and your students this semester? My co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer a short reading by “ungrading” pioneer Alfie Kohn in the 5th edition of From Inquiry to Academic Writing titled, “Why Can’t Everyone Get A’s?” Kohn challenges readers’ assumptions about the function of grades, concluding, “A consistent body of social science research shows competition tends to hold us back from doing our best. It creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming of the system, and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful improvement but on trying to outdo (and perhaps undermine) everyone else.” Invite your students to reflect on grading and its relationship to learning. They will have a lot to say. Together, you could apply those insights in the unfolding structure of your class. Alfie Kohn also wrote the forward to Professor Susan D. Blum’s new edited collection, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (West Virginia Press, 2020). I’ve just started digging in but can already feel the creative collaboration, spirit of inquiry, and compassion bubbling up through the authors’ insights. I’ll write more about this book in coming posts. I’d love to hear how you are building compassion, self-reflection, the space to breathe, and even a sense of play into your semesters. Let’s do it for our students, and also for ourselves. Photo Credit: "Assignments" by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 ... View more

United States Capitol Building I will meet my classes for the first time on January 20th, just after the Inauguration is scheduled to conclude. We’ll meet online. These will be the first classes I’ve ever taught where I won’t meet the students in person. My syllabi, of course, were drawn up and posted prior to the Insurrection that took place in Washington on January 6th. And I am writing now before Sunday, January 17th, when armed “protests” are planned at all fifty state capitols and at the Capitol in D.C. Assuming classes meet on the 20th, I imagine that Zoom will bring me face to face with young people who are shocked, afraid, and confused. In one class, we will be discussing frameworks for story-telling in the 21st century. In another, we will be beginning a semester-long project of reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Will either of these projects be relevant? Will either of them help the students make sense of what has happened in this country since Trump’s defeat in the general election? I’m certain all teachers are asking themselves versions of these questions: What do my students need to know right now? How can I use our time together in the virtual classroom to help them through these unprecedented times? What kind of assignments can I craft that will give the students room to think productively about what language can and can’t accomplish in times of crisis? Some will argue for normalcy and say the gift we can give our students is refuge from the political battles that will define the years ahead. I understand the sentiment behind this response and certainly wouldn’t argue against it. Even so, I am reminded of being in Murray Hall on September 11th, heading to a meeting of the department’s Executive Committee scheduled to start at 10am. Both planes had hit the Towers by then and we knew that the country was under attack. But we met anyway, at the Chair’s insistence, and conducted our urgent discussions about departmental business— the hiring plans for a world that no longer existed. And then, at 11:30, the meeting ended and F-15s were screeching overhead, all classes were cancelled, and everyone was told, by Central Administration, to go home. I won’t generalize to all institutions of learning. I’ll just say that this has been the modus operandi at my institution for the 30 years I’ve been here. Supreme Court decides the outcome of a contested election? The Second Iraq War? Abu Ghraib? Trayvon Martin is murdered? Stock Market Crash of 2008? #MeToo? Charlottesville? Impeachment? Underneath all this turmoil, classes continue, papers get written, grades get distributed with the steady hum of normalcy. The New Normal? The number of tenure-stream faculty in my department has remained virtually unchanged in the last 20 years. For much of that time, the number of part-time teachers in the department ballooned, as the university increased enrollments dramatically to generate revenue. Now, the number of part-timers has dropped dramatically, due to the university’s commitment to creating full-time non-tenure-stream teaching positions. The tenure-stream and the non-tenure-stream faculty pass each other like ships in the night . . . or did, before everything went virtual last spring. Meanwhile, during the time that I’ve been at my university, the number of English majors has dropped from a high in the mid-nineties of approximately 1600 students to 250 today. We’ve tinkered a bit with the requirements of the major during this time, but the majority position in the department has been and remains, “Stay the course.” For me, it’s easy to imagine the moment when having an English department is no longer seen to be a necessity. But that moment hasn’t arrived, yet. So, assuming classes are held at my institution on January 20th, I’ll be sitting at my computer, meeting this semester’s batch of students, to convene the work that remains vital to the maintenance of the democratic ideal: learning to think creatively; developing a tolerance for ambiguity; practicing the arts of thoughtfulness; experiencing the freedom that comes through the engagement with ideas, big and small. I’ll let you know how it goes. richard   "United States Capitol Building" by kimberlykv is licensed under CC BY 2.0 ... View more

This is part one of a two-part interview with Mia Young-Adeyeba and Michelle Touceda on the topic of online education during the pandemic. Mia Young-Adeyeba is a veteran English teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She has a passion for helping students develop into lifelong learners and for cultivating collaborative partnerships. In addition to being a high school English teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District, Michelle Touceda is also an Instructional Faculty Lead Mentor for new teachers and a past LAUSD Teacher of the Year.  * David Starkey: Mia and Michelle, thanks so much for allowing me the opportunity to talk with the two of you! I read about your work in a Los Angeles Times article about teachers using their ingenuity to help keep their students interested and engaged in online learning. Can you tell me how Distance Learning Educators, the Facebook group you started, came together and what its purpose is? Mia Young-Adeyeba: It all started in the breakout room of a Zoom meeting. We love to start our story off that way. Because we are both ambitious and always looking for new opportunities to grow as educators, our worlds collided during a district professional development course. We actually met for the first time in person to take the photo for the Times article.  DS: A very appropriate way to begin an online discussion group. Michelle Touceda: It's true! We kept seeing each other’s names in teacher trainings and serendipitously we ended up in the same breakout room in training for teaching other LAUSD teachers on Zoom. It was Mia that created the FB group. It was less than an hour old when she asked me to join her in running it. I don’t think either of us expected it to grow so large so fast. From the start, our personalities just really clicked and our different skill sets, I think, came together in a way that neither of us expected, but was obviously filling a void. The purpose is to provide access to education experts we may never have encountered without this particular outlet. The fact that I can get advice from an educator halfway around the world in real-time is amazing, and that I am able to implement it immediately is awesome for my students. That I can then do the same for someone else helps with those feelings of isolation.  DS: And I notice that the group is for all educators—not just teachers. MYA: Teachers, administrators, counselors, superintendents, and even personnel from various departments of education have all joined to build collaborative partnerships and support each other through distance learning. We now have 19 subject-based breakout groups and a dedicated Google Drive. Additionally, many educators have stepped up to help us moderate our groups. It’s been a team effort.  DS: That’s a real wealth of resources. What are some of the online learning strategies that have been discussed in the group that you’ve found most valuable? MT: What I’ve found the most valuable is the support and network of teachers I’ve come to know and rely upon. While I have taken away great strategies on everything from taking attendance on Zoom, to engaging students, to how to teach a lesson on Of Mice and Men virtually, I’ve also found a resource where if I have a quick question on some digital platform or am in need of a sounding board for a lesson idea, I have this group of educators there to help me navigate through the process. I was already comfortable incorporating different digital tools in my classroom, but teaching remotely was something completely new. This group has helped me and others in the same situation feel like we have the support and tools necessary to build on what we already know and find the right strategies to make that shift from in-person to online. DS: So, teacher training is a key component of making online education work. MYA: We both completed LAUSD’s Future Ready program, which highlighted many of the digital instructional tools we would later come to rely on as remote educators such as Nearpod, Flipgrid, and Kahoot. Our group members have helped me understand how to engage students who may choose to keep their cameras off. Some days I facilitate my class with only a Google slideshow and the chatbox and it works! I can check in with my students, I can give them feedback, I can put them into breakout rooms, they can submit videos of themselves, take polls...the methods are endless. DS: Those sound like strategies you can continue to use when you return to the classroom. MYA: Absolutely. Another thing I did last week was create a shared Google slide show and asked members of our group to add their favorite TED Talk along with three discussion questions. Now I have a document with 17 Ted Talks that will last me through the end of the school year. Check it out! The collaborative nature of educators in our group has been the key reason I have been able to manage teaching during a pandemic.    [Part 2 of this two-part interview will appear next month.] ... View more