propaedeutics
Wednesday 22 August 2007 | 2 cookies in the jar
At the moment I’m finding the teaching associate training incredibly frustrating, which I’m sure is no secret to its four instructors, since I usually sit in the front row and glare balefully at them—at first, ever-optimistic despite myself that something exciting will happen; and then fighting boredom by ignoring the “discussion,” doing the next assigned reading, or writing down my own unanswered questions and unuttered observations.
One of my fellow trainees informed me, wide-eyed, that I seem chronically pissed off, and another that I am “so cynical!” (Actually this last had nothing to do with the training—I had mentioned the way that all the twenty-something male creative writers refer continually and with touching pride to “my wife,” each holding her out in front of himself like some kind of protective crucifix; and further added the Brujo’s comment that each time, I felt sorely tempted to say, “Oh—you mean your first wife!”)
Where was I. Right—frustrated by the damn training.
Which is still going on. The three-week daily crash-course concluded, we’re required to enroll in this 3-credit class all semester, in which we’ll submit eight reading response essays, a full-length scholarly paper on current issues in rhetoric, and a “teaching journal” in which we’re supposed to write after each and every class meeting. To be fair this last is neither an alien nor a punishing concept, since I usually do it anyway, though not with such regularity—I’m, you know, a writer. I can’t process stuff that happens in the classroom unless it gets put on paper at some point.
All the same, I find myself huffy and defensive and resentful, which is kind of amusing for me but probably tiresome for the four women standing at the head of the classroom. Who did not, by the way, offer us the option to evaluate our three-week training. When I asked about evals, I was told I could write a letter or have a personal interview with either of the two department chairs. Nice and anonymous, eh? “Hi—this is the first time we’ve ever met and I’m about to spend three years in your department. So let me start out on the right foot by telling you everything wrong about that three-week training you just put me through!” No thank you. It’s gobsmacking to me that the New American University would have a mandatory, attendance-and-participation-monitored training and not let its participants evaluate it. Or, as I wrote to the two chairs (who had been pointedly cc’d on my original inquiring email):
For now, I don’t think I’ll be taking the instructors up on their suggestion that I either send you my personal evaluation of the training, or schedule appointments with either/both of you—not least because such an approach pretty much destroys the notion of anonymity which is key to successful evaluating—and I can only imagine how busy you are. I’ll simply add my thoughts on the training to the semester-long class eval which I assume will be a part of that course’s conclusion. At present, I’d just like to note how completely stunned I was that a three-week long mandatory university training, otherwise pedagogically savvy and au courant, wouldn’t offer its participants the opportunity for even an informal handwritten response. It’s clear that many people have worked many years to make the training the success that it is. And, I found it startling (and most unusual) that its participants weren’t asked for their feedback about what had been most helpful to them. Thanks for listening; I appreciate your time, and have a great semester.
Yep, that’s her—making good impressions and new friends everywhere she goes. Department politics already, and it’s not even September! (Poems?)
I have so many Thots about the training, and its semester-long follow-up, whose commitments will keep me from being able to take any literature classes, that it may be difficult to confine myself to my own teaching issues. Alors, rant follows; maybe once I get it out of my system, I can quit taking other people’s inventory and go on to assess my own situation.
I’m painfully bored in class, which is of course my own fault; AND. There’s the regular lack of interactivity (why can’t educators teach using the techniques they’re supposedly teaching us? why, after saying “I won’t read you the syllabus,” does Teacher #2 do precisely that? why doesn’t she make us responsible for interpreting its content and reporting back to the class? why do I constantly feel I’m being talked down to?), and there’s the disappointing caliber of my fellow students’ comments and concerns.
“How did your first day of teaching go? What issues came up?” we were asked at the beginning of the first “seminar” (which is held in a small lecture hall where we all face front and center). (Why couldn’t we have written about this and shared in pairs or groups? why couldn’t the question have been more clearly focused?) And my peers, thus given a long leash, responded with: “They can’t find the book in the bookstore” (a protracted discussion ensued) and “They can’t afford the book, why can’t I just photocopy it for them all semester” (another discussion) and “My class only has six students in it, is it going to stay that way” and “If more students add my class, do I have to do first-day stuff all over again.” I was on the verge of eye rolls and air breaks; I was horrible and obnoxious (”if I hear one more picky, cavilling word out of you, Franny Glass….”). After about half an hour of this I realized it would never get more interesting on its own, so I raised my hand levelly and when Teacher #1 finally called on me, announced flatly, “I don’t have a question. I’d like to talk about my impressions of my students.”
“Well, okay,” she exclaimed, half-falsely hearty, half-sardonically. Unfazed I held forth for a couple of minutes, as concisely as possible, about their already evident traits: surprisingly homogenous (so blonde! so tan! no piercings! no tattoos! but then, as I told them, it’s only their first semester; they have plenty of time yet to horrify Mom and Dad with their body mods) and desperately needing to talk about race (I’ll be swapping around some of the assigned readings accordingly—one white guy already addressed a black guy using another—the other—black student’s name), and surprisingly peppy, responsive and willing to engage, for adolescents at 7:40 in the morning. I then spoke briefly about my concern that I’d been too casual for the first day, and that I thought I’d need to dial it back and be more formal on Thursday.
I finished and there was a brief silence. “Great!” said Teacher #1. “Any other questions?” We went back to worrying about students being unable to find, locate, buy, read or otherwise manipulate their textbooks. I gave up, pulled out the assigned article for the next class, and read it while thusly trapped.
At least the readings are great—anyway I find them fascinating. I can probably find anything interesting, if I can get engrossed in JSTOR articles on comp pedagogy. But here too I encounter frustration—everything we’ve read so far seems focused on being direly diagnostic. Students are alienated from academic discourse, composition instruction does little to bring them into the dialogue and connect their writing to their own lives and observations, and comp teachers are weary, ill-trained, overworked and pedagogically backward—in short, the whole thing is fucked. Well, this is hardly news. But just as each article approaches the place where you think, Well now I’m gonna get some handy tips on how to turn around this hellish juggernaut of mutual misery and crappy papers—the article’s finished, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth and no classroom practices or technologies to dig my way out of the mess we’re in. As one of my new students said thoughtfully about The Invasion, which he saw over the weekend—it didn’t really end, it just kind of stopped. And it stops whilst still mired in theory, before it even begins to approach praxis, leaving me hungering for something prescriptive rather than just artfully rhetorical pissing and moaning. “I think that’s just what comp teachers like to do,” the Brujo shrugs. “I can’t tell you how many teacher trainings I’ve attended in which I wasn’t given anything I could actually use.”
The Brujo’s ideas are as usual radical on this subject—get rid of comp programs altogether. Roving instructors visit students in their subject fields and help them with writing for individual classes—establishing genuine, organic writing across the curriculum. Abolish grades for papers and substitute authentic assessment which becomes part of the writing process. I almost wish he were writing comp/rhetoric articles; except, you know, I don’t.
To conclude my own pissing and moaning: Maybe DBT is to blame. Yes, an innocent therapeutic modality! It’s focused my attention so much on behaviors that the buck now stops for me with actual observable actions and statements. This is all very nice, I think; but what are the classroom practices? What are the technologies to shift the balance of power, or to extract from students the writing of which they’re capable? So far from this training I’ve gleaned another thirty or forty tips, to add to my experiential stash of two or three hundred, but it’s not systematized and it’s hardly adequate to the problem.
Or so I, cursing and flailing and striding angrily and dramatically around inside my mental theater, mostly think. Sometimes though I remember my own first comp papers, written for honors English at the junior college, and how appalling they were. I still have most of them, written in prissy longhand and reeking of “I just know this will make the teacher happy!” When I came across them in a box, packing, I wept with laugher over their titles: “Two Cats I Have Known,” “Science Fiction: Bona Fide Literature,” “Life of a Salesman,” and the utterly prepossessing “An Analysis of Abner Snopes in ‘Barnburning.’” How did I ever improve? Mostly through trying to impress people who mostly couldn’t be bothered—the Republican, the ER Doctor, the Parisienne. To some extent Mandarin—how she and I honed our writing against each other, happily vying to see who could sound more like Anthony Lane. But somehow, alchemically and with twenty years of incessant, hand-destroying typing, I did improve. “There’s hope for us all, then,” said the Brujo, leafing through and helplessly laughing at sentences like: “Yes, all cats are unique—they are themselves, as different from each other as any person from another,” or “There is much truth, good and beauty to be found in science fiction by the fortunate, discerning reader.” (Et je t’assure, that’s the least of it.)
So maybe the problem is not of the soul-destroying magnitude I generally conceive it to be. Maybe their papers will be terrible and boring, either sucking up or blowing off, and maybe they’ll be alternately shy and inappropriately talky in class, and maybe most of them will get better, if never good, and maybe a few of them won’t. Maybe some days I’ll be too casual and flippant and give them the wrong idea about our level of discourse; and maybe some days I’ll be too formal, too much the talking head, and they’ll leave the class muttering their dislike of me and it.
Maybe it’s my day off and I’m done talking about comp instruction, comp instruction instruction, and the New American University in general. (And I didn’t even get started on the subject of my own academic class yesterday, which was painfully dire, or direfully painful, or, in short, bad. I may have to hang back a bit this semester and try, next semester, to sign up solely for independent studies.) My sole errand today: to buy one of those silly backpacks-on-wheels so beloved by adjuncts and pharmaceutical sales reps everywhere. Dragging around 50 copies of the syllabus, textbooks and half-a-dozen library books (ah, the library….another entry! ah, the flush of sanity which descended upon me as I wandered among PN, PQ, PR and PS and felt as I have not yet felt during this experience so far, completely at home) did my back and neck in yesterday and I fear that even with a bicycle I still need some kind of contraption to hoss my crap around. It occurs to me that I’ve always before taught in the same building where I had my office; so I teach in the Agriculture and Education buildings, which are a full mile from my shared-with-13-others office, so I must render myself more portable. Peripatetic, if you will. And perhaps corrupting some youth will follow. Maybe by Thanksgiving I won’t be the only pierced person in the damn class.
And we finish this post just in time—Finny barks ferociously, the postal carrier knocks, bearing Harry Potter books from Mandarin! Let the squeeing begin!
2 cookies in the jar
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Q. How do you choose your readings and can I see them? Actually, your whole syllabus? How do you like your classmates–or is it too soon to tell?
Seems like you’re less annoyed by the practice of teaching than the preschooly hoops you’re jumping through in order to be afforded the privilege of indentured servitude. Basically: you aren’t learning anything new and that’s annoying the crap out of you.
Pretty standard for a first college semester, I’d say.
Go, Un, Go!
Choose readings for the two courses I’m teaching? Well, They chose the textbook for us, and it was actually custom-printed for the State School at its behest, so I’m somewhat limited…and don’t want to bring in too many outside readings cos the poor students had to buy the $70 book so I want them to get some use out of it. It’s not a terrible comp reader by any stretch of the imagination; it has stuff in it like Jon Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres (?), The Onion, Andrew Sullivan, et al. Not terribly brainy but at least it attempts to be sexy. We’ll see how the students feel about it.
I will happily email you my syllabus, most of which was also dictated to me, literally in many places word for dull, prohibitive word, per the draconian policies of Them and their composition program. Anything that you see in there you actually like? probably is mine, developed over the course of six arduous semesters at the tribal college.
So far, I like my comp students much better than any of my classmates; the students all seem so touchingly young (only one out of the 38 is even 21 years old) that I can forgive them almost anything, even racism and idiocy; but I’m rather more judgmental toward my peers, if that makes any sense at all. Which I doubt.
More on all these exciting topics soon, soon….probably daily, if today’s tirade is any kind of foretaste of the squid-ink clouds of pointless angry verbiage to come!