The CCC(C) Took My Baby Away

"Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where's the Sex Pistols?" by Geoffrey Sirc introduces an interesting idea: "I don't mean to romanticize Punk, but rather to heuristicize it, to trace what I feel is its most useful, essential thread" (981).

That is, to teach writing as a way of rejecting writing, and ultimately "purifying writing, loving writing," and practicing, "the simple, unconscious art of the fetish" (984).

This is an intimidating pedagogy, the one of the Punk. In fact, I firmly believe it will not work.

I was interested in this article immediately (as a former Punk with a now re-emerging Punk Rock ethos) but realize that there is a difference between practicality and idealism.

The very foundation of this a Punk pedagogy is contradictory (particularly basing it on the "theory" of the blindly rebellious Sex Pistols). Dan Graham claims that Punk, as a stage of music appreciation, was "a preliminary stage" in the ultimate dismissal of albums "in favor of making one's own music" (984).

I think it's a matter of word choices. How can learning to hate writing make one want to write? If this is indeed an analogy of Graham's idea, let's consider what Graham is really breaking down. Listening to punk is considered an action that leads one to stop listening to and start creating music. No education in the art is necessary, just attitude. I understand and appreciate that.

But consider the differences between music and writing, particularly writing in a composition class. In music, there are albums produced as a commodity and live performances, which were/are especially valued in the Punk scene for the very reason Graham points out. A punk rock show is a place where the act of listening converged with the act of creating. This should be the same in the classroom; students learn (of) the rules and then adapt to or reject them and emerge as independent, clear thinkers.

But it's the way Sirc puts it: "We never taught writing as a way of hating writing" (984). Maybe we never should. If you want composition students to do what Punks did/do, you want them to take a passive, private action like listening, to an active, public venue where performances are held. The composition classroom is not analogous to listening to Punk music and gaining that self-awareness that instructors hope for.

Why?

1) Composition classrooms have no private space that translates into a public space where listeners become the listened to. Perhaps the private space is online in a blog posting or in a freewriting journal but these are all activities carried out and assigned in what would be the public space. The Punk rock venue is the classroom also. The classroom is where the student should emerge from learning to creating. Students are then evaluated on this development. But, as Sirc claims, "Punk performance was not judged according to standard criteria: 'Whether they were good or not was irrelevant'" (979). How are we to assess progress?

2)If there is any analogy to listening to music in composition, it is reading. Sirc neglects this connection to writing. Good writers are avid readers who learn to adapt authors' styles, just as Punk musicians would learn to reject the records they listen to. If you are to be like the Punk as a burgeoning writer, you must read and reject the rules or forms you come across. If you want to be really Punk, like the majority of Punk musicians, you may not even have to read. Wouldn't that be the ultimate rebellion? Ignorance?

This is no longer a pedagogy of seeming hip while covertly getting students to become autokinotonic writers. This is now an attack on literacy, a serious consequence of embracing Punk as a way of learning or teaching.

The problem with Punk (and why so many echo the credo that "Punk is Dead") is that Punk was never as self-aware as Sirc claims it was/is. Teaching students to be self-aware is a bold, brave, necessary move in the classroom, but to take that step through the words and actions of Punks is not practical.

The ultimate failure of a Punk pedagogy reveals how Punk works in the first place: Rebel against anything, at all costs, dismantle a system and let someone else figure out how to make it all work again. We see this in the story of Sid and Nancy, which Sirc lightly touches, where there were vague answers to a seemingly senseless but brutal crime. The Punk-ness of the Sid and Nancy incident is the very chaos Sirc attempts to harness. The Punk does what he/she does to exhibit his/her ethos and the job is done. Consequences be damned. Sometimes, as was the case with Sid Vicious, even the Punks don't have answers when pressed for an explanation of their actions or ideals.

A Punk pedagogy is set to fail from its inception in its dishonesty. Punk, as a form of music and philosophy, was never meant to be appropriated in a system like that of a university where there are such defined figures of authority. I can appreciate the trick that a Punk pedagogy attempts to pull, but it is an echo of a de-centered classroom: the students seem to be in charge, but they only gain that "authority" by having it given to them by a greater authority. Authority is the antithesis of Punk Rock.

I was once your father, now I am your brother...

Amy and I are in a position where we feel that our family tree won't be a branch but a little sapling whose roots are bound up with the roots of the larger tree everyone else will be constructing.

I hope we're wrong.

We've had great help from those who are still actively teaching/living in our quest to connect our prof. with the ancients.

But we're dealing with linguists here. We got Dr. (Ted) Taylor. If we can connect somewhere around Claude Levi-Strauss or Ferdinand de Saussure, we'll be in luck. Until then, we'll probably meet you all around Horace/Virgil or Dionysius Thrax. Hope to see you all at MIT w/ our pal, Noam Chomsky (PhD in '55 at the University of Pennsylvania)!

Considering my role in all of this (some 4-5 slots away from Chomsky, maybe 4 away from Henry Sweet) makes me realize the scope of ideas. We all may have access to the findings of the folks we're researching (JSTOR, etc.) but this project is showing me how we can all be influenced by the more intimate elements of a student/teacher relationship that developed when we may not have even been alive.

-Andy

Coleridge and Creativity: My Strawman Argument for a Larger Debate on Creativity in a Composition Classroom

Emily's presentation on Coleridge, his ideas on creativity, and creativity's connections to writing was compelling for me. I really latched onto the idea of the hatred some theorists have for Coleridge's philosophy.

Coleridge's perception of writing as a product of inspiration, not cognition, is very, for the lack of a better phrase, "artsy-fartsy." David Bartholomae immediately provides a paradox for Coleridge's ideas on writing in the introduction to"Inventing the University."

"Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion--invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English" (605).

In short, you can't wait for inspiration to come sweeping through the strings of your aeolion harp-self when you have a paper due at the end of the week on subject you may not really care about.

Maybe, then, Coleridge isn't talking about ALL writing, but just creative writing. Bartholomae continues: "The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community" (605).
Darn it, creative writing has its own community too.

So, Emily's discussion on how much contemporary theorists loathe Coleridge's handcuffing of creativity to writing has a basis for me when considering Bartholomae's points.
Emily's final point on rhetoric engaging imagination is interesting too: we have to use our imaginations to make arguments effective, even in the most dire predicaments, but how do we get students to associate creativity with rigidly structured academic writing?

Pueblo, represent.

In his work, The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body, Todd Taylor seems to be agreeing with Bizzell and Min-Zhan Lu's faith that "students from the margins can effectively operate, or negotiate, within both dominant and home cultures and that the effect of such border crossings can be the subversive and productive reverse acculturation of the dominant group by the marginalized" (220). From this belief that marginalized students can change or influence a dominant culture, Taylor proposes that "profound, deep-seated difference is, by definition, non-negotiable" (220); difference can make an impact but can not be made uniform.

Taylor notes that there is a history of researchers who "[bring] up issues of difference or suggest that he or she is attempting to consider the circumstances of people of color but then fails to address either difference or color in substantial ways" (221).

Jonathan Alexander, in Out of the Closet and into the Network: Sexual Orientation and the Computerized Classroom* is almost in conversation with Taylor. Alexander's research is focused on marginalized voices also, those of reticent homosexual students. Alexander points to Jeffrey Weeks' "particular history" that shapes sex and sexuality. Alexander asks, "The question now is, of course, how do computers help students realize and think about the 'social phenomena shape[ing this] ... particularly [sic] history" (211)?

The same question could be asked by Taylor. Both authors point out that computers can serve as anonymous forums that will allow for "reverse acculturation of the dominant group by the marginalized;" for Taylor, we must recognize the physical bodies of those who respond online in a disembodied place for the effect of reverse acculturation to take place (223). For Alexander, online discussions allow for "a growing awareness of how 'normalcy' is a construct and not a given" (215). Reverse acculturation, although never stated as such, is occurring in Alexander's study. Taylor simply suggests that reverse acculturation is possible if certain steps are taken to recognizing the body that is active in the non-body of a computer network.

I'm generalizing Taylor's discussion terribly, but it's important to note that both authors, who were published in the same issue of Computers and Composition, see the computer as a way to equalize voices.

*I have to point out that it was startling to see that our institution (under a former name) is published in a text from Bedford/St. Martin's and that Dr. Margaret Barber is acknowledged as well. Pueblo, represent.

Forward to the past (or something like that)

Gotta get back in time... (I couldn't NOT make the reference.)

There was a big connection going on among Vico, Locke, and Hume, that of the knowledge that comes from experience.

Vico: "Knowledge of oneself is for everyone the highest encouragement to bring rapidly to a conclusion the study of the entire cycle of learning" (4). Knowing yourself and your capabilities is directly tied to your ability to know more or apply your existing knowledge.

Locke: "For though he that contemplates the operations of his mind cannot but have plain and clear ideas of them, yet unless he turn his thoughts that way and considers them attentively, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations of his mind..." (427). You must know your own mind to know your thoughts and what you think about your own thoughts. Pretty meta.

Hume: This is the shift in my observation, where Hume claims that those who read primary historical texts "wou'd attain but a very confus'd idea of the transactions of that period" (285). Hume's contemporaries needed him because no matter how much they knew themselves and their thoughts, they just weren't enough like Hume that they could contextualize and simply understand the purpose of a past text. Knowing yourself may have been all well and good for Hume, but you need to know more than yourself and your immediate surroundings; you must know what came before you and how to interpret it.

It seems that Hume is bridging the gaps left by Vico and Locke. A person can not be so self-involved, there needs to be a thread from the ether that binds our experience with knowledge. In other words, things have led us to be where we are. Things have occured that make us believe what we believe. Hume felt there is a need for people, like himself, to analyze and interpret history to provide the needle and thread that may sew our experience together. Hume, as Marilyn pointed out, expanded Locke's idea of empiricism: all original knowledge comes from experience.

The more contemporary comp./rhetoric folks take that a step further: we gather knowledge from our experience of trying to gather knowledge (as convoluted as that sounds). Faigley and Flower both explore the process of transcribing thoughts. Fish looks to the self as the subject of study, not the text that the self "experiences."

The connection between experience and knowledge seems to have survived scrutiny but the analysis of that connection has not successfully proven empiricism.

Johanna's discussion with Faigley that revealed that Faigley knew little of Vico was interesting, considering that both are wrestling with the same essential question: Does knowing oneself (be it the mind, the self's experience, or the mind's process) equate to simply knowing?

Life in the slow lane

Enos addresses an important question: Why so critical?

"[We] can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand [new material] evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses" (12).

But he also mentions a problem with getting that new material evidence; some scholars believe "that dirtying one's hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do" (15). "Troy" is referenced because Enos is talking about rhetoric and its origins and discovering new facts about it. But anything can be "Troy." A scholar's "Troy" can be an author's archive at a university, or a living person that could provide a wealth of knowledge but who has remained an untapped resource. Enos notes that some scholars would be against this search for new information to be critical towards because some are comfortable with where their research is and where it is going without new physical findings, without true progression.

This is like Plato's "pure" vision of the nature of the solar system that Maxine C. Hairston discusses: "To this kind of Platonic temperament, rhetoric is anathema because it necessarily means becoming involved in all those areas of life that the reclusive mind, which would rather grapple with the abstract than the concrete, despises and fears" (68). In other words, rhetoric demands that you be active rather than passive, progressive instead of static.

Hairston's citation of Arthur Koestler made a vague connection that I wish to define a little more here. It seems to me that, in the study of math and science, you are always building on previous knowledge. Numbers are not very malleable things so you discover, say, an equation, and use it. You can't explore the nature of the equation once it has been explored to the point of making the equation. You use it. You use the equation to find new equations and cut into the earth of mathematicians' Troy.

So we have our "equations" in rhetoric. We have found texts and lessons and applied and examined them. We have looked at what we have of the history of rhetoric so much that it has gone through its stage of alienation and dismissal (and since we're just starting this class, I'm assuming I'll learn exactly where rhetoric is at now, later) so what are/were scholars afraid of? Reading these pieces about rhetoric and its place in education and history makes me wonder what academicians are waiting for or, more accurately, what they fear from this new information. I'm left with these questions because I don't think the articles we've read explain why there was/is a sedentary movement in research (unless I missed it, and if I did, please point it out, it's driving me bonkers).

Trust...in theory.

"Reading a report, like driving over a bridge, is an act of faith--faith that the other fellow has done his job well" (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, Schoer 193).

I feel if my pedagogy is not well defined then those who are subject to it are learning in a foggy environment.

I wish there was an answer to my questions that have come up in the construction of my pedagogy. I look to some research from "Research in Written Composition" for a light: the discussion on the mode of discourse. There is narration, description, exposition, argument, or criticism.

My pedagogy is full of criticism of my own beliefs, sprinkled with argument (primarily over what students are capable of when trusted), and looking over the precipice of description and exposition. I'm on my way.

But something that "Research in Written Composition" says is a little disheartening for someone, like me for one, who is developing his pedagogy: "...a colleague wrote on page 196, 'What is the sense of attempting an elaborate empirical study if there is no chance of controlling the major elements in it?'" Of course, this unhappy "colleague" is referring to bodies of students and their instructors, but his/her concern can be extended to what constitutes a pedagogy.

Granted, a pedagogy isn't empirical. This is what I think I believe, after all. But I'm talking more about how I take what I believe and make it work in a class. I'm asking myself the same question that the colleague asks in a different slant: not what is the sense in applying my pedagogy but how the h-e-double toothpicks do I do it? How do I account for those "major elements?" There is, after all, no way of controlling them.

That's precisely the problem, I discovered. I can't and shouldn't control variables. I can only trust that things will work out the way they should, like, as the introductory quote tells us, crossing a bridge. I trust the students to do what they should (like pay attention and be accountable) because I can't "make" them do anything. I can ask, suggest, and they should follow through. The only things I can "make" are assignments. They make their grades.

I should clarify that this is not promoting a de-centered, student run classroom. That's impossible. And if it were possible, it's irresponsible. But how much more responsible is it if you don't know how to take what you believe and make it happen in the class? The students trust me as much, or more than, I trust them to do what they should. The students are taking a class from someone that they trust is doing his job well. My pedagogy should help me refine exactly what I mean to communicate to students while defining exactly how I feel about the whole shebang, elements, variables, and all.

Gone Engfishin'

Macrorie's excerpt from Telling Writing had some great, but not entirely applicable, things to say.

"Phony, pretentious language of the schools--Engfish" (297). A catchy word to discuss the stilted language of developing (maybe even fossilized) writers. Well said.

This excerpt is what got me going:

"They spend many hours in school mastering Engfish. The fact that the teacher and the textbook sometimes employ Engfish suggests to them that it's the official language of the school. They're learning a language that prevents them from working toward truths, and so they slide into telling lies" (299, italics mine).

"Working towards truths...." Sounds familiar, like, Truth: Plato::Aristotle: truth.

Our good friend, Eudora Welty points out, "The trouble with bad student writing is the trouble with all bad writing. It is not serious, and it does not tell the truth" (299).

Huh. This makes sense: stilted language is stilted because it isn't entirely true. If I were to suddenly stop making sense while talking in class, then I'm lying to everyone, including myself, that I am certain of what I am speaking about (see Samuel Butler's quotation at the bottom of 301 for further affirmations of honesty).

That awkward, lanky language is a result of simply trying too hard, to show off, or as Macrorie says, placing ones "vocabulary on exhibit [...] rather than putting it to work" (300). A remedy for this is an unself-conscious exercise to just write and write something true.

I couldn't agree more. Be more honest. Let me know who you are and things will get done quicker.

But what about analysis? Where is this writing going to be accepted in an Eng. 101 or 102 class, let alone an upper division literary studies seminar paper? I point to this passage as an explanation for my concern:

"This is the first requirement for good writing: truth; not the truth (whoever knows surely what that is?), but some kind of truth--a connection between the things written about, the words used in the writing, and the author's experience in a world she knows well--whether in fact or dream or imagination" (300).

Let's break that down:

-"...truth; not the truth but some kind of truth--" So not Platonic Truth but Aristotalean truth. Students who are to become better (or just simply be good) writers must differentiate between the Truth and the truth, an objective universal Truth, and the truth of a murky, multi-faceted reality, two things they have no concept of. Maybe students have encountered moments where they must define ethics in terms of a situation, but it is a rare student who has knowledge of the philosophies of the capital-T and the little-t.

-This little-t truth must coalesce from "a connection between the things written about [topoi?], the words used in the writing, and the author's experience in a world she knows well." When a freshman composition student is conducting a rhetorical analysis of her first academic journal article, those connections between things written and words on a page (how what is written is an effective argument) are what's important. The connection to the "world she knows well" may be made internally but must not make it on to the page. We are, after all, looking for objectivity (Truth). We are also looking for objective analysis, not a personal narrative (truth).

-The world this writer knows well has license to be relative to any aspect of the writer's experience, "whether in fact or dream or imagination." Imagination can have no role in Truth, and has a small part to play in truth. Truth is the way it is. truth is a perspective of the way it is. Imagination has a minimal, if even existent, contribution to analysis of a limited topic like a single academic essay and its application of rhetorical appeals.

So I wonder, how do we expect to cultivate writers' abilities in their first year in a college, in a single academic year (ideally), by essentially just having them write? And the majority of what they write is not as free-spirited as what Macrorie advocates. There are discussions of terms that are applied to the analyses students conduct and write on but this is the extent of their foraging in the forest of rhetoric.

They learn of ethos, pathos, and logos, but not of the Truth and the truth, which is what they are driving at in their studies and analyses, and what Macrorie repeats is the key to improving a person's ability to write effectively.

I was introduced to rhetoric, its history, and its concepts as a graduate student, as if I were finally ready to understand and tackle rhetoric for what it is: the strategic use of language, the art of communication. We are asking incoming freshman to invest in becoming better writers without understanding the reason for writing academically in the first place. What is to gain for a student who does not know that there is a discussion on Truth and truth and that that discussion still carries on? What reason do they have to care if they do not know that they can be a part of that discussion and have their voices heard and considered?

I point now to Christensen's conclusion on page 296:

"The teacher who thinks that writing is an art and that art cannot be taught, that the teacher can only inspire and then keep out of the way, will not find anything he can use. But the teacher who believes, as I do, that the only freedom in any art comes from the mastery of technique, may find here the means both to kindle and restrain."

There seems to be no clear way to teach "good" writing or find a time-tested way to make writers "better." But if there is anything that remotely shows, without the tests of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer, that writers can understand how to shake off that gnarly Engfish, it is through the understanding, and possibly eventual "mastery" of the art of communication. Rhetoric and the search for Truth or the resignation to truth is what must be understood before any writing can be developed.

Descartes before the horse

I've never taught before, EVER, and I am teaching not one but two Eng 101 courses this semester. In addition to never teaching before, I have never taken composition 101 or 102 at a university.

I am in a unique situation.

So I put myself in the students shoes and think, "Who is this guy?" "I'm taller than he is." "How young is he?!" My ethos is in major need of reinforcement.

So I dress the part and speak differently but that does nothing for the fact that these students are not entirely interested in the subject that I am teaching. I could be a forty-year-old doctor of literature or rhetoric or whatever and still not break through the wall of "this doesn't matter to me."

So I devote my time more to making this subject relative to them than I do to tying my tie (which does take more time than it should).

These students are not on some other plane of existence than I or anyone else is: they just simply don't know what I know yet. Maybe they understand the fundamental concepts of rhetoric but just don't analyze them or know the terminology. In fact, the only thing the students and I have in common, philosophically speaking, is that we are thinking, living, breathing entities in the same room. The Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" mantra is something that never escapes me suddenly. But that's just me; we all think in vastly different ways.

Although he was talking about his attraction to the theatre, Thomas Sheridan said something that made me realize I can not be so cerebral about my approach to teaching: "At length...I found that theory alone would never bring me far on my way; and that continual practice must be added to furnish me with lights to conduct me to my journey's end" (17).

I'm beginning an attempt at getting a room full of people who have believed in and/or attached a stigma to composition to see that rhetoric is inherent in all of us. The one thing that we all have access to is language and we have language for a reason: to communicate. If students understand that our means of communication contain more ideas than just grammar or whatever else they believe to be dry and boring, then they can see rhetoric living and breathing through them. If they can identify it in themselves and the world around them, then they should certainly be able to identify those ideas in the reading for class and be better writers for it.

That's my theory. We'll see how idealistic I am in believing in a (Socratic) collective rhetoric that needs only be drawn out of students to be understood.