Teaching Rhetoric and Composition

A teacher knows everything. In learning, teachers work as facilitators. They help students with acquiring new things and implementing those new ideas on paper, alongside teachers help the students making the way to use that knowledge in their practical life later.  We all know, teachers need to study a lot. Though, they just get 50 minute class or 1 hour class, they have to research a lot to lead that 50 minutes class. Because when you have to inform others about something, that requires good knowledge over that. If you understand well, only then you can make that easy for your students to understand. Otherwise, you will revolve around and make things difficult for students. For the FYC class, grad student instructors have to go through the same process. They need to study a lot. From my own experience, I can say how many nights I spend on understanding a single topic  clearly  so that I can quench the thirst of my students. To students, teachers are sources of kno...

“A curriculum designed to empower students must be transformative in nature and help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values needed to become social critics who can make reflective decisions and implement their decisions in effective personal, social, political, and economic action” (Banks qtd. in Shor 16).  This week’s readings on Critical Pedagogy from Paulo Freire and Ira Shor really resonated with me, especially after being unsettled by the “unpolitical” approach to classroom teaching that we discussed last week. Shor challenges the concept of a politically neutral classroom, arguing that classrooms that don’t engage with questioning the world prevent students from developing the critical thinking skills that enable action. As a result, these classrooms seemingly align themselves with dominant social structures, clinging to the “status quo.”  Similarly, in “The “Banking Concept” of Education” Freire discusses a “problem-posing education” that reinforces t...

Hi all, I'm looking for some thoughts from you regarding your tech policy and student attention. I've talked about this a bit in class before, but I don't have a tech policy. I began my semester with my students explaining the reason for that--I want them to be responsible for themselves, and I don't want to spend time policing them. I think to some extent that they get what they put in out of a class. This has worked okay for me so far. I know that students have laptops open and they're almost certainly looking at something not related to class while I'm talking. For some reason, this doesn't bother me quite as much as students who have their phones out and are clearly texting right on top of their desks, as I'm teaching the class. As I'm watching them do this, I'm just imagining the questions they're going to ask later about things I'm taking time to explain now. It's maddening. Today one of my most engaged students, who sits ba...

“First-year teaching assistants (TAs) are introduced to the FYWP and their new jobs at a three-day orientation prior to the start of the fall semester. At orientation, new teachers participate in workshops on grading and classroom management and are introduced to the syllabus they much teach during their first semester” (Restaino 3). The concept of this orientation, though informational, reduces pedagogy and first-year writing to bupkis! Ultimately, I feel as though informing teaching assistants of their responsibilities in this way—a three-day, pedagogy excursion— produces damage that is two-fold. Approaching the program in this way: 1.      Delegitimizes the field that scholars who belong to it have been working to protect for ages. To treat composition studies, pedagogy, and student assessment in this way, is to abuse the trust that students place in their institutions to instruct, inform, and advance their learning (that is not to say...

Though we try to prepare ourselves for all the common scenarios we might face as teachers, I am still faced with significant anxiety when unexpected things do happen. Today I got an email from a student upset about their grade on the first Writing Project. They want to come into my office hours and talk through it. I expected that this might happen, I feared it might happen, and today it did. Even with the preparation of 601 and everything I learned from mentoring in the fall, I felt upset and unprepared for the situation. Before emailing the student back, I checked their grade on the paper - a solid B. I supposed that maybe this student isn’t accustomed to getting B’s, or felt that they needed to plead their case. I responded to the email, saying that of course they could come in to discuss the paper. Though I know my grade was fair, and I made plenty of comments on the student’s paper, I’m still nervous about meeting to discuss it. Giving number grades to students is incredibly diff...

Maxine Hairston's "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" continues to infuriate me, even after having read it last semester. I find this idea that the classroom is supposed to be a judgement-free utopia for our students to be incredibly naive and outdated. Our students live in a world where the classroom is far from a utopia: they've grown up doing active shooter drills and watching on the news as other students their age are shot in their classrooms. To continue to pretend that classrooms are somehow exempt from the effects, particularly the dangers, of the outside word is to do an incredible disservice to our students.  I think much of what Hairston and other scholar's like her (shout out to Stanley Fish) fail to realize is that many professors have incorporated politics and argument into the classroom without it becoming a place for them to indoctrinate their students. There is a huge difference between educating your students on current events in an un...

In Restaino’s First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground ’s final chapter, “Thinking What We Are Doing: Knowledge Making in the Trenches” I was struck by Hannah Arendt’s worry of there being inbalance in student and teacher labor relationships with work. There is a difference between work and labor. Work may be seen as the tasks to be undertaken and finished to make a product while labor is the process of growth and development to get to that finished product. When these two get confused, it can lead to a difficult time for both the students and teachers in the writing classroom. Restaino argues that “the task of ‘thinking what we are doing’ is far more monumental than it seems” (106-107). The process of reflection and cognitive awareness of the task before you are more important than completing the actual task because the task is designed for improvement and to teach something.  This is something that graduate student instructors h...

I am glad to have read the experiences shown in this book. I find very interesting to see how other graduate students are going through the same type of issues I am facing, as I usually share with my peers. It is good to know that despite the weaknesses that we may find in the graduate teaching preparation process, there are some people who care about improvement. By reading this book and reflecting on each classroom episode it depicts, it is gratifying to see that someone thought of us, the current and future GAs. When I first started my journey as a TA at Ball State, I was aware of my responsibilities as a graduate student. Sometimes, I played in my mind with the idea of teaching at the college level. How would it be? How would I plan my own lessons? How could I become the teacher I had always wanted to have as a student? These are just some of the questions that surrounded my mind as the days passed and the big challenge of being a teacher got closer. Today, I started week 6, s...

In the final chapter of Jessica Restaino’s First Semester , Restaino explores the complex relationship grad students have with their department and how WPAs have a difficult time accommodating both faculty and grad students, as their university expectations are also complicated. Overall, I think Restaino’s book has been eye-opening and validating in that it has made me realize that I am not alone in my struggles as I teach; however, it appears that WPAs have a difficult time figuring out how to approach us, similarly to how we have a hard time approaching them. Something I have been having a hard time process is just the ways in which the members of our department communicate with one another. The general impression I have gotten from Restaino and my own experiences over the last semester or so have shown me that not only do grad students have a difficult time finding ways to adequately convey our concerns, problems, and overall confusion to our mentors, administrators, and so...

thoughts? opinions? feelings?

Today I want to talk about a book that we're reading for the other section of 605 - Literature - that I think is a good resource for teaching Rhet Comp, too: Brookfield's The Skillful Teacher .  Particularly, I want to discuss Chapter 3, called "Understanding our Classrooms," because the whole time I was reading I was marking every other page for some helpful tidbit that I could implement in my classroom, and I'd like to hear some other opinions on the practical solutions he's offered to problems we've been dealing with. Here's a run down of the contents of the chapter: One of Brookfield's tenets of skillful teaching is an awareness of how your students perceive your teaching and your classroom. This chapter offers tools to find out, as well cultivate classroom engagement. The first tool he discusses is the one-minute paper, which can be used either before or after class - it's a essentially a check in, a free write. He usually asks question...

I really dislike fake positivity, the idea that no matter what happens we should be positive and smile. I find it invalidating. The things that hurt us and upset us and make us uncomfortable define our values and are remarkable sources of influence to inspire change. I find it extremely important to embrace negative feelings and use them to work through situations. But damn, my students are NEGATIVE negative. Part of their participation grade (worth 20% of their final grade) is contributing to a twitter where they have to tweet twice a week. TWICE. A. WEEK. 605,000 seconds in a week and they complain and gripe about spending 40 of those on interacting with their classmates. Then, when they do use their Twitter, they use it to complain about the Twitter. I know it’s nothing personal but it feels degrading and insulting to have spent so much time tailoring my syllabus to my students wants/needs (on the first day of class we talked about our classroom policies/expectations a...

I'm handing back my students' first major assignment tomorrow (or whatever one might call the digital equivalent), so I of course spent much of my weekend on the grading process. I include under that broad umbrella of process the time spent actively not grading to clear my head and distance myself from difficult essays. I started thinking this way several years ago w/r/t my creative writing activities. At first glance, it seemed like I was only spending small amounts of time here and there writing. I wanted to write more, wanted to get better at that craft. At some point, though, I realized how much my writing was being influenced by the time away from the page. Yes, those separate experiences provide fodder for the writing process, but being able to get distance from the work I am trying to do lets the ideas gestate and come to fruition in a manner impossible if I am staring at a piece of paper. Likewise, I think good grading practices involve times when one is not grading. ...

“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress As educators, we often discuss the ways our teaching methods can, and do, benefit students, especially when it comes to student-centered teaching philosophies. I agree that the area of composition studies has evolved from the traditional model of the teacher as lecturer and the student as listener to a more learner-focused environment. It is undeniably better that most instructors have shifted to a teaching style that favors the learning process over the teaching process and acknowledges that students have different learning styles. First-year writing classes, in particular, have advanced with the teaching concept that writing is a process, not simply a product.  But even after all the conversations we have (as colleagues and graduate students), I am often left wondering if we ...