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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wow. You certainly are in a unique situation and I eagerly await word of how it's going! I too have never taught before but that's my ultimate goal. I imagine I'll be in a similar situation when it happens: very little experience and teaching comp. Good luck and let us know how it's going!
ReplyDeleteLanguage, composition or rhetoric, are they the same? It seems that rhetoric is oral but composition takes principles from it, as the art of writing including ethos, pathos and logos and the five canons of rhetoric. To draw out of students collective rhetoric I believe can be done but perhaps not universally or with perfection. It seems a little like Jungian theory,with universal archetypes. I bet you are a great teacher. Just identifying what is composition is apparently a yeoman's task as it is still being debated at length by the leaders in the field
ReplyDeleteI think if anything, your own growing background with rhetoric will make a positive difference in how you teach. I took comp at the community college level ^.^ and while I think the teachers there did a great job with how to structure an essay and the different forms of essays, a little more rhetoric would not have hurt. You have the opportunity to teach your students how to use the different theories of rhetoric out there as tools to make their own writing more flexible and relevant. Of course I'm guessing that teaching relevance is an occupational hazard of the comp teacher.
ReplyDeleteI had a wonderful teacher in high school who was able to prove to me that rhetoric was inherent in everything that I did. Not only did it lead to a job where I use rhetoric to make money, but it led to an enlightenment that has helped be more successful in every other college course. I hope you don't lose your idealism as you continue to teach.
ReplyDelete