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April 27, 2005
actually, no.
ann landers today:
Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It's the sure footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
i could almost continue this for her: "so, as you can see, if you don't have class, or people say you don't, or you're categorized or categorize yourself as being a member of a low class, it's not because you can't afford to shop anywhere but at the wal-mart, or because, sweet as your daddy is, he's a drunk with an 8th grade education who didn't know how to help you get ahold of any better opportunities than the ones your resource-deprived & underpaid school counselors could come up with, and you couldn't afford that car to get you to the community college, nevermind paying for tuition & books & gasoline & somebody to watch the baby. no, it's because you lack self-discipline, self-confidence. you just don't know yourself. you're a coward who hasn't proven that you can 'meet life'"--and who's administering those tests again? who are we supposed to prove it to? i wonder where she thinks that confidence comes from, if not from privilege, from being able to take enough of this for granted that you can focus on self-knowledge, from being well-equipped to "meet life" because the right people were there to teach you the appropriate handshakes?
can somebody please tell me what makes this any less a victim-rhetoric than saying "well, we don't think rape is okay or anything, but she did go out wearing that dress..."
no wonder we can't have a half-cogent conversation about class in this country.
(xp to lj)
Posted by ttobryan at 06:57 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
tj 308: week 14
technology twists around & surprises us; five years ago i'd never e-mailed anything to a student in my life. today molly was collecting drafts so she could get them back to students with comments by thursday so that they could revise them for next tuesday, & kevin pulled one out of his bag & said "oh, but i'm not going to be here thursday, so..." her first response, while he was still shuffling, was "well, i can e-mail it to you." in those five years we've gotten awfully accustomed to this. kevin's hard-copy, however, wasn't going to work well w/that now-reflexive action.
they solved the problem easily--he works on campus, and suggested that she use campus mail to get the hard copy from our office to his, so he could pick it up when he got back into town on friday, & she agreed to read it first so she could get it into campus mail tomorrow.
the moment of hesitation, though, & the to-both-of-them puzzling reversal of the computer-geek young economics major with a piece of paper & an in many ways old-school prof with an already-become-instinctive expectation for electronic communication was priceless.
Posted by ttobryan at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
another 3-part blend, this time of voices
one's branaugh's; the other two i'm not giving away.
below is the complete text of a short paper for lwp's 720--i finished it today, but i started it yesterday, & i'm keeping the part about it being the bard's birthday, because it was when i wrote it.
i'm posting the paper here for 2 reasons: 1) because it's possible that someone other than me will get either enjoyment or enlightenment out of reading it, and 2) because i like it. it probably won't do so well as a class assignment. it breaks at least one of the assignment's spoken requirements and probably defies a few un-specified expectations; i won't go so far as to say that's why i like it, although perhaps it's an influence. i will say that, in general, defying expectation might be a prerequisite for enjoying the things i write. in a better mood, i'll find a way to make that sentiment productive and career-defining.
for the time being, i'll settle with this: i managed to do my homework by writing about a) aim conversations and b) shakespeare. in a literature-free department.
A few nights ago, a friend and I were having a late-night onscreen computer chat that took a turn towards Shakesperean monologues. I was scanning through the scripts online, making suggestions; he was reading them aloud in the empty room he was in and reporting to me about how energized this made him. It was midnight, one in the morning. At one-thirty, unable to stand being left out any longer, I got him on the phone and made him read one of the monologues to me. It wasn't the most compelling or dramatic reading ever done—he made me admit to that, and in the moment I could do so honestly, especially given the obstacles the performance was up against—the hour, his relative unfamiliarity with the material, the ridiculous incongruity of delivering a Shakesperean monologue in a flourescent-lit office into the impersonal mouthpiece of a hunk of beige plastic with your physical inclination towards embodiment, towards movement, restricted by the cord. But it was resonant. Is resonant. Days later I'm still compelled, hearing his voice in my head conflating with that of the last actor I heard give the same speech—and the first--and find myself walking wide swaths through the living room to avoid being diverted from my work by the siren-call of my battered Pelican Shakespeare—much loved and margin-noted in pencil-scrawls some ten years old already—resting on the fireplace shelf.
Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness, outlines an admittedly simplistic categorization-system for the body-processes—and he makes no apology for that pragmatic but potentially unsettling affiliation—that facilitate the consciousness we experience, that allow me to respond to the monologue in the moment it's being read, to react to it and appraise its attributes immediately thereafter, to frame and categorize the experience for later retrieval; to remember days later my reaction, my appraisal, and my categorizing; and to continue forming new connections based on each of those experiences as I experience other things slightly differently than I would have done without the monologue.
Damasio's system divides selfhood—too loosely, the thing of which we are conscious, when we are conscious—into three levels. At the most basic is the proto-self, the "nonconscious collection of representations of the multiple dimensions of current organism state" (199) where neurons fire, chemicals interact, and muscles respond to reflex. While I held the phone, my proto-self kept breathing, pumping blood, regulating my internal temperature despite the dropping mercury in the room, maintaining the homeostasis required for consciousness to occur—all of which it would have done just as faithfully were I running a race, playing video games, sleeping, or idling in a coma.
At the next of Damasio's levels is what he calls the "core self," roughly corresponding with what he calls "core consciousness," the "transient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening" (199). My proto-self might not distinguish between a coma and a race (not because different reflexes aren't functioning or neurons firing—in some cases they certainly are), a video-game and a monologue, but my core self, being a conscious "I," very much can. At the level of the core self, I was aware of the dark of the room, the phone in my hand, the voice-sound emitted by the sound-technology, the shapes of word-sounds—all of these are what Damasio calls "objects," and the interaction of my organism, or proto-self, with these objects affords the "construction and exhibition of new knowledge" that continually charaterizes core consciousness (169). In addition to being aware of these "objects," and creating conscious awareness out of my interactions with them, in the ever-present "now" of core consciousness I was also aware of being aware. This is not a spiritual distinction for Damasio; the first-order neural-mapping he identifies as being the work of the body to respond to environmental changes in order to maintain the biological homeostasis of the proto-self is part of a larger pattern which includes the second-order neural mapping of the core self, mapping that enables the body not only to respond but to make and respond to imagistic representations of its own responsiveness. Neurons fire, connections are made, knowledge is constructed. Damasio describes these second-order maps as a kind of non-verbal narrative we use those images to tell ourselves; they're how I understand that right now I'm typing at a keyboard, sitting on a sofa, hearing the fishtank burble and a car-horn honking out on the street. They're how I knew I was in a chair in the dark on the phone hearing a monologue. But they aren't how I know, sitting at this keyboard now, that several days ago I heard—and was moved by—a monologue. The core self is, as Damasio notes above, transient. In terms of its functioning, it changes little over the course of a lifetime; awake, not clouded by medication or emotional overload, I am always aware, in moments, of my own awareness of the moment I am in. But the moments it is aware of are always new moments of processing and constructing knowledge, new imagistic narratives of the present-tense. In order to know that the monologue happened—and, more importantly, that it happened to me, what Damasio calls my "autobiographical self" and its ability to construct and exist within my "extended consciousness" must be enacted.
The extended consciousness is not bound to moments and non-verbal narratives; it exists as a realm of connections and re-connections that make possible meanings and interpretations. It is aware of its own "autobiographical memory," the "organized record of past experiences" (199) that, in my case, among an uncountable number of other interconnected experiences, includes having the sheet pulled over my head so the doctor could isolate and carefully weave the stitches I had in my chin when my brother tripped me on my grandmother's patio, gazing into the face of a boy I danced with at my high school prom, and listening to the other night's monologue. It is the extended consciousness, which Damasio identifies as a "prerequisite to" our ability to "behave intelligently over vast domains of knowledge" (199) that makes it possible for me to remember and write about the monologue now, and not just in terms of my own experience. Extended consicousness allows me to recall now that the monologue was read to me earlier in the week; it is also how I know I first read the monologue contextualized within its scene, act, and play as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, how I remember lying on the floor with 8 or 10 close friends to watch Kenneth Braunagh's movie-interpretation of Henry V (because that's the play in question) on the floor of my mother's house, how I know I've seen the film many more times than that, how I remember the dark, almost-empty high school auditorium where I watched a friend under a single spotlight deliver the same monologue as an audition piece, how I know Braunagh directed other movie-versions of Shakespeare's plays, how I can name a few of those, how I know who William Shakespeare was and that today is his birthday. The complex web of connections the autobiographical memory relies on and its inherent fallibility is also why, although I'm sure I knew at the time, I no longer remember what my friend was auditioning for—it wasn't a stage production of Henry V, which I know thanks to one of the most peculiar quirks of human memory, one Damasio doesn't take up: I can't remember a complete list of the productions my high school theatre staged, but I can still identify with confidence items that aren't on the list I can't remember.
In Damasio's words, the study and enactment of consciousness aren't just about what neurological events happen when my heart beats while my body rests obediently in a chair, when I hear (and by responding to my own image-mapping know I'm hearing) a friend read me Shakespeare, when through memory and interpretive connection I can understand the content of the speech, know from that content when to expect my friend's vocalization to rise and fall in pitch or volume, and remember other voices rising and falling; consciousness is about the feeling of what's happening. From the first, he describes consciousness as being made by both "body and emotion," and at first glance, this seems a viable enough distinction: it's not difficult for me to conceive of my being physically tired and chilly during my friend's monologue while at the same time being emotionally—a word we use in common conversation that aligns more closely with what Damasio calls the "state of feeling made conscious" (37)—alert and delighted. As he describes them, "emotion" and "feeling" are both themselves unconcious states. Emotions are biological, are "complex, stereotyped patterns of [neurological] response," "at their most basic…part of homeostatic regulation," and are, as repetition and experience teaches us how to categorize and pattern them, always "inseperable from the idea of reward or punishment…pleasure or pain…[and] the idea of good and evil" (54-5). Feelings are the images of these emotions we make as part of the second-order mapping strategies our core selves use to bring us to awareness of what we're experiencing; only when this awareness occurs does Damasio describe us as conscious and capable of "feeling a feeling."
Here is what happens when "emotions"—whether by our common understanding or Damasio's specifically biological one—are set side-by-side with characteristics of the "body" in Damasio's formulation of consciousness: the tiredness and chill my physical body experienced were things my proto-self knew about and was working chemically & neurologicaly to respond to. My core self neurologically mapped imagistic narratives of these experiences so that I was conscious of them and knew in the moment that I was tired and cold. Through its neurological storage-and-retrieval and association systems the extended consciousness of my autobiographical self allows me to remember these now. Rather than contributing to and/or constructing consciousness in different ways, however, as his title might suggest, my what-we-call-emotional alertness and delight are part of this same formula to Damasio: my proto-self was balancing the objects "alertness" and "delight" alongside "tiredness" and "chill" (56), my core self was making nonverbal narratives from and so affording me conscious awareness of these objects and my responsiveness to them, and my autobiographical self remembers them too. Using his more basic conception of emotion as a pattern-able biological response instead of making an already-patterned and so recognizeable respose an emotion-object makes whatever difference his title implies even less discernable: emotion is part of what the proto-self is already occupied with handling, is part of the map of images we become conscious of in the transience of our core selves, and is part of what remains retrievable to our autobiographical selves. Regardless of what our first category-making responses to the split might be, Damasio's own theoretical work defines emotion as already biological, already of the body, and "body and emotion" is a nonsensical distinction.
Shakespeare knew this. At the turning point in the monologue, when the king shifts his focus from exhorting the devotion of his men to promising them their reward—for if emotion is always about punishment and reward, and you're trying to convince an army to face the probable punishment of death, you need a nice reward to offer those who beat the odds—he calls them to look into the future and imagine themselves remembering, and in that moment of projected remembering he describes their bodies as unwitting actors-out of emotional response:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is namèd
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. (4.3.41-3)
The old men Henry describes—the projected selves of who the morrow's battle will become—do not decide to "stand a-tiptoe," presumably not the easiest task for the agèd and war-wounded; their response is an enactment of the (becoming-conscious) feeling of the (unconscious) feeling of their neurons making second-order imagistic maps of the first-order emotional response their proto-selves respond biologically to when their eardrums vibrate to the sound of the word "Crispian" spoken with a countryman's crisp pronunciation. Although I imagine the Bard, given his apparent interest in consciousness, psychology, emotion & human motive, would have been intrigued—if not utterly captivated—by Damasio's work, he'd probably have called it something else.
Posted by ttobryan at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2005
amalgamation
i posted this (xp to lj) a handful of days ago, when i was starting to think about these things i didn't read nearly enough of for lwp's class. i still haven't--instead i've read the whole next book too quickly, and already gotten too far behind to take a reasonable stab at the one supposed to be coming after that. it's too fast, and too dizzy. before i lose our entire conversation about blending, though, i thought i'd move this over here, record it where the nerdspeak's meant to live. i'm not sure it says much of anything at all, but i hope it will remind me of the pictures these ideas make in my mind, of the monk's journey, of what i almost understood and might have made use of if we'd stood still to look at it for longer than a glance.
sometimes for no particular reason you remember something. like you take three steps out the front door, and you're on the sidewalk, passing by budding tulips, between two wooden houses, and you have this flash back to somewhere else, somewhere with nothing at all to do with front doors, sidewalks, tulips, wooden houses. this time it was a slightly dark room with a bright world outside, a counter someone stands on the other side of to find things for you, show you things, take your money. a counter with brochures and maps on it, as at a travel plaza, and small stands or baskets with other things--sunscreened lip balm, mini-mag-lites, mosquito-repelling wrist-bands. i glanced around quickly, before the picture faded, before my next foot touched down, but i wasn't fast enough; this morning's world came back and left me only with a blend.
possible memory 1: the camp store/rental place at pohick bay regional park where paul scored roger & i a pair of canoes to take us & some gypsy's dog on a bald-eagle-sighting cruise in 2000(?)
possible memory 2: the park store/rental place at kejimkujik national park in nova scotia where brian & dave & i went paddling around the mist in search of islands in 1999(?)
possible memory 3: back at the camp store/rental place at pohick bay, where terry and i were sent to check out the park's goodness-for-camping-parties potential for meg and scott in 1997(?)
in the blend (Fauconnier and Turner's terminology), the counter is the same (matching connection). the maps are different, but look the same from several feet away (counterpart connection). the light through the windows should feel different but doesn't stand out clearly as different enough (generic space)--it was colder in nova scotia, physical-climate anyway, although the mental was warm enough. the doors are different--the one that in woodbridge leads to the back room with the piles of paperwork and keys on hooks in jakes' landing leads to some visitor-center room with birds' eggs on display (completion). what makes it impossible for me to separate them now, in addition to not turning fast enough in the memory-flash to see who i was with, is (the emergent structure of) what they had in common, the sense of adventures pending, of being in safe but uncertain hands, of being a little lost a lot too far from home.
listening to:
Posted by ttobryan at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)
April 19, 2005
english needs this word
sprachgefühl (literally, "language-feeling")
- an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate
- also, the character of a language
Posted by ttobryan at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
tj 205: week 13 1/2
12 papers out of 18 in within 12 minutes of the due-date--and when "date" is calculated in minutes, i don't mind being a little liberal with them. 2 i expect in by midnight; they're in the hands of last-minute busy-bees who got permission ahead of time to have the extra three hours, one in my good graces and one grudgingly, since she neglected to tell me there was a problem until after the paper was due. my general policy on that sort of thing sounds something like "NO!" she's a good kid, though, with a good track record, & it seems like a mean thing--and not enough of a writing thing--it's a writing class, they need to be graded for writing or not writing, not for proper excuse-making behavior--to hobble her for.
the other 4? no excuses, no sob-stories in my e-mailbox, no last-minute phone calls... so as far as i'm concerned they don't exist. maybe they'll exist in automatically-reduced form tomorrow, & maybe they won't. either way, i'm going to bed rather than sitting up to wait for either the papers or their excuses.
good news is: i graded the first one before the due-date even rolled around, because it was submitted a few hours early, and it was awesome. A for i'm-not-telling-who-yet.
Posted by ttobryan at 09:54 PM | Comments (0)
tj 308: week 13
sitting in being mostly observational is weird. too easy, because i'm not doing the work of being the teacher--and certainly not doing the work of prepping for the course and grading student writing, and although i did have my turn of that the first half of the semester and shouldn't feel like a slacker for shifting turns, i do anyway. it's what teachers do. how can i be the teacher--a teacher, anything like a teacher--without doing the work? and too hard, because sometimes corey looks at me, with this half-smile of conspiracy, like we're students in the same class both learning from molly and watching to see what she does that we like and don't, and that's just an odd position to occupy. there's nothing wrong--or at least nothing i'd know what to change--but it's weird.
the writing she has them doing looks great, from what i've seen of it, but it isn't really passing through my hands unless i pick things up they're workshopping on the days i happen to be in class. molly's and my schedules aren't compatible at all, so every time anything needs to go through both of us--we gave them progress reports last week, and so they needed my grades as well as hers--it's an intricate logistical dance of e-mailing drafts and leaving things in each others' mailboxes that i wouldn't want to do with student papers--the likelihood that we'd lose or mistreat their work is too great, and i want it treated with more respect than that, even if that means that i'm not seeing it. they're almost done, though. 3 tuesdays left, 3 meetings i'll actually be there for, if they're in class the last day instead of just submitting work, and then lord knows what our evaluations are going to look like, or even what in the world they'll choose to evaluate--they have so many choices.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2005
IS style paper intro
listening to:
I bought my first CD as a senior in high school, a time in anyone's life when almost everything is terribly profound. The CD, still earning its keep in circulation in my collection, is Toad the Wet Sprocket's Fear, track 3 of which includes a slightly eerie yet intimate female voice-over most of whose narrative about looking through coin-operated binoculars is relatively forgettable. This line has always stood out, however; I still hear it in all sorts of situations with no apparent connection to the song's preoccupation with sea-coasts, loud cars, butterflies:
You know how when you get so close to something that big, you can't see anything at all?
Even the most oblique reference to the study of style—or, really, the defining of, discussions about, classroom and hallway pedagogically-focused mentions of, pontifications on the stuff—brings that line around in my head again. The very word unsettles me, making me feel pinned to cork like a butterfly when asked to speak about it, progressively disqualifying me from expertise a little farther every time I learn a little more about the stubject, clouding my tenuous grasp on any one approach each time I encounter another. My students make statements about the stuff that I know I've made, statements that seem naïve, limited, problematicly exclusionary in their implication, and I'm frustrated every time by having no idea where to start to correct them, by being unable to decide whether correcting them is ethically any more responsible than leaving their perceptions alone. Style is political, hegemonic, prescriptive, descriptive, grammatical, creative, constricting, liberating, revolutionary: it's that big. From far enough of a remove to list those adjectives, it's possible to at least aproximate a sense—to have a feel for, if not any kind of vision of—what one's trying to ascertain. Any closer, and you can't see anything at all.
i have no idea where i'm going with this, by the way, but if i commit beginning to the page--and to the web--i'm hoping that'll shame me into conintuation. any suggestions?
(xp to compositionism)
Posted by ttobryan at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
tj 205: week 13
papers are due monday.
monday night, after we do some last-minute editing work in the computer lab monday morning, but monday nonetheless. my sense is that very few of them have actually planned out the things they need to have all in order for this to work out well, and i'm terrified at the prospect of them turning in 12-15 pages each of crappy last-minute work, but they haven't asked for an extension, & i wasn't going to be the one to propose it. i might do it anyway, giving them 'til wednesday come monday, as an 11th-hour bonus, but i wasn't fool enough to offer today: nothing would get done all weekend!
the other thing i'm terrified about: i've completely not planned for the reality of having 12-15 pages each of paper--crappy or brilliant--to grade in addition to everything else i'm supposed to be doing next week. i've spent more time this semester in downright denial than probably combined throughout the rest of my life.
we spent the week doing small doses of sentence-level work: how (again) to introduce sources, nate's generic these-words-must-be-included thesis formula, prepositional phrases & "tion"-words as indicators that you're making an awful lot of things--probably too many--into abstractions, abstract phrases as less effective (especially when they're endemic) sentence-subjects than more direct "characters" (i hate that term, but so long as i'm using this book--and i like most of the rest of it--i'm stuck w/their word-choice) as acting agents.
we spent the last 2/3 of the week workshopping drafts, too. i gave them lists of things to accomplish, but i didn't do a lot of fierce enforcing. i'm always afraid i'm going to impose too much of my structure on their projects--they have their own needs & worries & agendas. i don't want to waste their time with lists of questions to answer that work well for some of them & totally aren't relevant to where they are for others. but i think i need to do a better job teaching them how to be readers & listeners & suggest-ers. i think i give them too much credit, not for being more capable than they are, but for being more knowledgeable and confident.
Posted by ttobryan at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)
observation
dave nentwick's 205, 8am, thursday, april 14th.
at 8:02 there are 4 students in the room, and 2 whose things are there but whose bodies aren't. "don't sit too far in the back," he warns me after welcoming me to the room; "i'm gonna be putting you to work. i'm terrible at keeping secrets!"
the plan for the day, he explains to me and the 4 students there, is to work with handbooks and sentences. he and i debate the relative merits of a few handbooks we've worked with, while he waits to see who else might trickle in. "do they all have the same one," i ask him (mine don't). "i hope not! you all set, matt?" he asks, turning his focus to a particular student whose project seemed a little uncertain last time they'd talked.
his plan for the day, he explains, is "a little healthy competition, a game with sentences--i have sentences from things you've written over the semester that i've been pulling out that we're going to play around with. any other questions or problems before we get started?"
"my computer had a virus," one student explains (the logistical snafus never end). "so my e-mail's been broken. that's why you haven't heard from me. i have everything in hard copy, though."
"hard copy is like cash," he assures her; "it still works in most places."
at 8:14 the 2 girls they were waiting for come in with handbooks--they'd gone back to their dorms to fetch them--and the rest are still idling in front of computers or scanning the web. over the next 5 minutes 2 more of them appeared, so he tired of waiting with a total of 8--2 teams of 4 at least made his intentions plausible.
he calls them together up to the front of the room, assigning them to groups & telling them to get together, & puts instructions for the game on the board: for each sentence he puts up, they have 3 minutes to locate/identify the problems with its commas (1st team to do so correctly gets 10 points), then the winning team gets a chance that bumps over if they fail to name the problem in grammar-speak for 5, then they have 3 minutes to compete to find the relevant sections in their handbooks for 10, and for 5 each at the end can point out any other problems in the sentence. "i didn't want to lecture at you," he explains, "because talking about grammar can be as boring as anything on the entire planet, so i wanted to have a little fun with it. if i were making more money, i'd have a prize for the winning team, but you'll have to make do with honest competition." i'm designated as the judge of good revisions & the tie-breaker for disagreements, which i manage okay--i concur with most of his assessments, have purely stylistic disagreements with one, and do a probably inarticulate job of trying to explain the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, which is really not easy to do without a whiteboard marker that works to make examples with.
as a class, in the time they have left, they only get through 3 of his 9 sentences, both because the many-stage nature of the game has them spending a lot of time on each one and because they're all lethargic about the whole affair--or perhaps just in general. each step takes coaxing each time, and is met with a lot of quiet resistance. "i don't know. i haven't done this since 6th grade. who's got a book?" i don't suppose it's ever easy to get excited about grammar, games or otherwise, and he'll pace it differently next time--you never know how these things will play out until you run them with real students in real rooms. and i'd wager that with 20 students NOT at 8am he'd have stirred up more interaction, movement, engagement (if not earnest enthusiasm).
i like the idea. i'd tweak it, but i always tweak my own after i run them too--games are also on my list of things i need to work on b/c other people do them quite effectively, and variety is always supposed to be better for students and classes--when you're predictable, or at least when i'm predictable, people assume they won't learn anything new by coming & stay home. i wouldn't, however, admit to them that i was trying something new. confidence counts, & grumpy morning-faces aren't usually the best responders to being cheerfully made guinea-pigs of. well. i say that. i usually admit too much of that stuff--i'm not good at keeping secrets either. i'll settle for i'd advise against it, and probably fail to follow my own advice!
watching dave's classes and working with him has been fantastic. that's the short answer. the long one will have to wait until i'm more caught up with writing about my own!
Posted by ttobryan at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)
observations: conferencing (2)
friday, april 8th, 3:20 pm
his next conference comes in early, interrupting his scattered attempts to eat lunch, but he just smiles at her and says "how are things?"
"good!"
she's chipper, has a bibliography in her hand, and immediately starts in with a question—she had trouble finding stuff about violence in cartoons at the library, she says, so she googled it & got lots of hits, but "they're mostly opinions—I'm not finding any real facts."
dave responds by observing that opinions are still part of public knowledge: they show trends, reflect what people are talking about—"can we back up," he interrupts, "and can you give me a kind of overview of what you're doing and what you see it looking like?"
she explains—it's obvious that they've talked about this relatively recently and she's re-explaining—that she's planning a report about the effects of television violence in the form of a children's book, she's thinking of "giving a survey to kids" (by which she means SU students who used to be kids), & "maybe just research."
dave asks her to specify: "what kinds of research might you get or have you been looking for?"
she recounts the trouble she's been having with finding sources in the databases (my first thought as i was listening was that she probably really needed better keywords; i'd have rolled over to the machine with her & tried a few, or at least asked her to produce a list of the ones she'd tried next time) and describes one editorial she's read that really intrigued her.
dave suggests ways a writer can center a piece like that & come at it from different analytical angles, investigating its agenda & using other ideas to do that.
"i'm having a hard time," she says, getting to what i was already seeing as her biggest problem with this project, "because there are so many places i can go."
"can you do all of them," dave asks, giving her the benefit of the doubt, "in the kind of project you're envisioning?"
"i think it would be really jumpy—from one topic to the next."
he offers her some advice about narrowing—that she go through what she's found so far and read for her interests, common themes she sees reocurring, connections between them—look for ways to connect key elements because she won't be able to do everything her rapidly expanding topic makes possible.
"how do you isolate variables to link them to behavior?" he asks rhetorically, having pointed out a ridiculous net of possible variables already—"it can't really be done."
he asks her next about how she envisions her audience, and they talk about the "for dummies" book series as a genre.
"are you going to draw?"
"i might, a little bit. i might use images from cartoons."
"good—connecting claims with examples." they talk a little about what kind of cartoons, what the virtues might be of doing that. "are you gonna make like a book-book? front cover, back cover, bound & everything?"
someone in the class is apparently making her own paper for her project—the range of possibilities for project-scope & the created artifacts to demonstrate their work is really broad.
they return to discussing the potential for her to highlight the editorial she's found, talking about ways to pull out and center its claims to refer other sources to, and then move into talking about how she might do interviews or even simple surveying to gather more information—he suggests strategies so simple as lists of check-boxes or open-ended informative questions—"so and so says x; what do you think about that?" "it also sounds," he says, "like maybe you're having trouble with the scholarly stuff." he's got an old paper from a previous year's student whose bibliography he offers to send her, & suggests she try experimenting more with search terms—"who do your editorials mention? what surveys or sources do they cite or refer to? go to those places first."
then they pull their chairs together to look in detail at what she has so far on the bibliography she brought this her, and he asks questions about each one: "who are these people? what do they say their mission is? who works for them? what clues about this organization can you get from its url?"
he sends her off with an overall evaluation of "cool" & some ideas for "round 2" of her searches—"work over the weekend," he tells her, "and then in class we can sit down together and poke around a bit [on the web]. i don't have any other questions if you're okay."
she is, or says she is, & heads out looking purposeful, while he turns to me to talk about how he's structured the assignment, what ideas she started with and abandoned already, & how beautifully some of their projects (every year) are envisioned, which visions some of them will follow through with triumphantly and others will neglect to the point of atrophy.
Posted by ttobryan at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)
observations: conferencing (1)
friday, april 8th, 2:15pm
1-to-1 conferencing in dave nentwick's office.
dave asks the student's permission for me to stay when she comes in; i'm at another ta's desk with a pad of paper dave's torn sheets out of for his own note-taking. she's seen me sitting in the back of the room before & says she doesn't mind.
"so how are things," he asks, starting off really generally: "feeling like you've got a direction?"
"no," she says simply.
"you bagged your proposals & all that stuff we talked about before?"
"well, no, but…"
she describes her tentative intentions for doing some interviewing, for a focus & approach for her topic—"i have a few questions i'd like to run by you, actually," she says in reference to the mention of interviews." "my friends pay more attention to late-night tv than the news as sources of information—i'm going to try to find literature on this."
dave re-states his understanding of her topic & asks her to relay her major claim & intentions.
she explains that she heard a new version of a media story she was relatively familiar with from a professor whose expertise she trusted, which led her to wondering what the media wasn't disclosing.
dave re-states again: "so you experienced a kind of disconnect. seems to fit in with the gist of the course—the influence of media on popular opinion." her interests so far seem to point in two directions, one toward an interest in finding out what's really going on in the story she's researching, and another in finding out where her peers actually get their impressions of & understanding of this & other current events. it seems a little overwhelming, & she's waffling.
dave encourages her to "[not] throw out a topic too soon until you've talked to people" & asks her about her plans to do some interviewing.
she explains her plan for sending out a series of successive e-mails with only a few questions in each one, because she knows when she gets surveys from people if they have a lot of questions she won't answer them; the sample she's considering is about 10 of her friends in california.
"do you have a hypothesis in mind for what you expect to find," he asks, & she explains the media version of the story she thinks everyone has heard. "& what might you do with these pieces of research," he asks again, to get her thinking; she responds by sketching out an array of things she's seen directly or found reference to in other places.
"do you have a sense of whether you'll be able to get archives of shows?" when she says she really doesn't know, he rolls over to the computer, talking halfway to himself and halfway to her about what materials he thinks might be available through communication studies or the library's website. he finds her a link to the "archive of television news," but nothing about late night programming. "know anyone who tapes them? i don't know anything about how tivo works—"
she doesn't know anyone who tapes the shows, & explains that you still have to plan ahead of time to record things on tivo, so that won't work either, & they start talking instead about how she can use interviews to find out from people who do watch the shows what impressions they got from watching them, even if she can't get ahold of the shows to watch them herself—"quiz the people who said they got their information here—what facts seem to be the most memorable? what other media do they consume?
"is that sensible," he asks her, when they've gotten a handful of possibilities out there: "does it make sense?"
"yeah."
"are you feeling any better about it?"
"no." they both grin when she says this, she a little sheepishly, him warmly; he's got almost a half hour left and a wealth of good ideas.
"what are you worried about?"
she says mostly she's having trouble finding "scholarly literature," and she's concerned about the lack; he suggests some places she can look for more support, but reassures her that the few more scholarly sources she has, combined with the more popular accounts fitting to her subject that she's already working with sound pretty good to him!
"once i get researching!" she adds, and then "oh—my questions!" pulls out a typed list of potential interview questions to hand to him. "i was just wondering if you could add anything—or take away their bias."
dave reads the questions aloud (another thing i need to get better at doing) and reacts to each, letting her know which ones look clear to him, which ones he's kind of guessing at & that she thus needs to further refine. "this is really the hinge question that lets you move from these general questions to this more recent phenomenon," he says, identifying a rhetorical shift she probably doesn't notice herself making in the middle of the page. he takes a really in-depth look at the content and implications of her questions, pointing out what seems to be missing and that there's a discrepancy in focus—the opinion questions seem more centered around the right-to-life debate while the others are more about the media, and either set could easily be branched in either direction, but she needs to decide exactly how she wants to structure the conversations and her findings. when she agrees that he's making sense, he moves on to making some suggestions about how she arranges the questions, to talking with her about the pros & cons of interviewing via different media—phone calls instead of e-mail force you to be more structured, he pointed out, and always remind whomever you're interviewing how much time or how many questions is/are left—"it lets them know they're near the end & makes them more likely to give you good answers."
"okay, i guess that's it," she says. "i need to figure all this out soon, because they're going to forget about the [current media firestorm] case."
dave reminds her she needs a detailed proposal plan for tuesday—"how do you plan on presenting all this?" he says it's something he's planned on asking everyone, and sounds to me as if he's both letting her know he's not directing the question only at her and reminding himself.
Posted by ttobryan at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2005
accidentally ballistic
3 rhetorically-minded language-geeks on 2 computers w/too much culturally confusing crossover going on = a conversation much like this:
me: we have rulz?
cap'nj: yes...calvinball rulles
me: kickass. field goal!
me: bonus points for palindromes, negative points for l33+-sp34k?
cap'nj: (trans for c): WTF?! (for dissing 'leet speek')
me: omgwtfbbq!!!
cap'nj: he says you don't do it well because it's 1337
me: it's not uniform. :-P
cap'nj: clearly you speak a non-standard dialect
me: that's the whole point. it's a calvinballistic dialect.
cap'nj: (trans for c): u got pwn3d!!!
me: dude. bonus points for accidentally saying "ballistic."
me: pwn3d by WHOM?
me: you? him? he wishes.
cap'nj: (trans for c): stfu noob
me: tell 'im to phj34r me.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)
tj 205: week 11
conferencing is (feels like?) a weakness of mine.
i don't know if my students know this. i try to be friendly and accessible, and from their responses i think i succeed at that. what i'm less sure of is whether or not i succeed at actually doing or saying anything truly valuable while they're here.
this round wasn't my favorite kind, at least in terms of being able to point to having accomplished anything, although it's much less work: they came in for each a required conference to talk over their research paper plans at the point in the process where they'd done a lot of research, gathered sources, started annotating them for a bibliography due tomorrow, but hadn't really started writing yet. the point was to talk through what was working, what trouble they were running into, what concerns they had about what might be going to work or not work.
when they bring texts, especially when they send me texts to look at beforehand, i have concrete things to talk about. this way i was mostly just listening, identifying potential problems, giving advice about outlining, getting them to talk through potential organizational plans... which, in retrospect, doesn't actually sound bad at all.
but i know there are people out there who are really organized about it, who have scripts & questions to ask everybody, have a list of things to make sure they do, have detailed plans & cover o-so-much-ground... whereas i'm basically chit-chatting.
fortunately, i happen to be a firm believer in the virtue of social interaction as an element of invention. chit-chatting is officially (as of right this minute) part of my pedagogy!
tomorrow i'll go observe a few of dave's conferences & see how he does it differently.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:22 PM | Comments (1)
April 03, 2005
tj 308: week 10
molly's got the class working on something simple, but simply brilliant: they've picked a piece of their own writing, pre-existing, created for some other purpose, brought it in one day last week to talk about in groups to generate lists of stylistic observations about it, & are now working on writing what she's calling "museum cards" for the pieces.
museum cards are 250-word descriptions of the piece that do what cards on the walls beside paintings at an art museum do--give a sentence or two of contextual introduction and then tell visitors what the highlights are of the piece, what to pay special attention to, what the author's intentions were & how to seem them evinced by what he/she has written (in the uncomfortable but jarringly awareness-provoking 3rd person).
simple--short, evaluative, reflective, analytical--simply brilliant.
Posted by ttobryan at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2005
tj 205: week 10
despite the fact that doing so runs entirely contrary to my understanding of blog-ethics, i'm fully intending to go back and fill in a few of these missing weeks. i have my doubts about blog-ethics anyway, to be truly honest, and the point of having a record rather exceeds trying to live up to them anyway.
this week we're at the "have started doing lots of research, have gone through a few rounds of proposals, are thoroughly committed to topics, and are out in the world gathering & starting to write" stage of unit 3; next week we're meeting in individual conferences monday & wednesday & then getting together friday to collect annotated bibs & start talking about drafting & style.
we've actually been writing in this writing class, which i'm quite pleased with. i don't feel like they're doing enough... stuff sometimes--i have a hard time coming up with heuristics when anne asks. but although i'm still talking too much--they're not really discussers, & i have to figure out how to engineer that differently next time i teach this class--i'm often standing by not saying anything at all, because they're writing. and about that part i feel pretty good.
friday it was summaries--i asked them to read part of the first chapter of a sequence for academic writing, & bring in a source they'd found for their papers, & then after we talked about the chapter (including their technical difficulties (a) with getting the pdf to open read-ably (3 of them) & (b) with remembering to do the reading (3 others)) they each wrote both a 2-3 sentence annotation-sized summary of a 3-4 page chunk of one of their sources & a 3/4 page elaborated summary wherein they were supposed to take the book's advice & break their readings into small summarizeable chunks, to make sure that what they ended up with accurately represented the author's distribution of & emphasis on different ideas.
then, almost out of time already, we spent 7 or 8 minutes reviewing wednesday's work with warrants (from chapter 11 in the craft of research)--i couldn't put our nice board-diagram back up because yesterday, inexplicably, the room had a blackboard eraser but no chalk--and had them take whatever they said in their 2-3 sentence summary was the main claim+reason in their piece and find & write out its overarching warrant.
the book does a not-terrible job with warrants, although the chart they use as an example has to be built exactly backwards every time you draw it. working just with the book, it's not very intuitive. once we got it on the board, it made a lot more sense... at least to me. some of the people who most would have benefitted from the demonstration, though, were the ones not there. too often that seems to be the way. tiffanee, for example, who's making a good effort but is easily frustrated & seems to feel like she's just missing a few things everyone else takes (or seems to take) as already-obvious--i try to set up these lessons & activities to build some of those conceptual bridges, & she always seems to miss the days i do it. or casey, who picks these things up really quickly if he's here for them. neither one of them is chronically absent, either; it would bug me less if they were. they're usually there, just not usually on the days it would probably be most beneficial for them if they were.
& that's at least a lead-in to the thing that's been starting to worry at my mind a lot lately about my teaching (& everybody's): to what degree do we design classes--individual lessons more than entire courses, for me, but i've heard other people say they do the opposite--around one student, or around 2 or 3, when there are 20 of them there who may or may not have the same or even similar needs & interests? do we always do that? (& only notice when that one student isn't there the day the lesson's just for him or her?) do we have any choice but to do that? we couldn't teach 20 lessons per class even if we could know exactly where they're each at & what they most need to hear.
Posted by ttobryan at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)