My Archives: May 2005
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Diversion
I made a comment a few days ago that the S.A.T. nonsense which circulates in our profession and earns all kinds of outcries is really a diversion tactic, one not unlike moves the Bush administration often makes to displace attention regarding the war or some other issue ("marriage" being one such gesture). We see more composition diversion in a NY Times Op-Ed from the Fish, who has made a good living getting attention for being conservative lately. The Op-Ed has already been sent out to the field's main listserv where folks will no doubt engage in this very trite topic once again without any real resolve (content vs form – now there’s a new issue to debate!). Resolve is not Fish's desire (his argument is quite weak and can be easily deconstructed or disproved with just a tiny bit of comp theory, or it can be turned back on itself - his own class has the so-called "content" he says he disapproves of: the content is language acquisition and construction). But that's not what's up. What's up is this odd, non-conspiratorial move, to keep us focused on non-issues. It’s not a conspiracy per se, but rather an overall move within education to always keep the important issues to the side: labor practices, the legacy of print culture on how we organize curricula and the work we do, the emergence of new communicative technologies and how to teach with them, the over abundance of PhDs in English, the need to revitalize our objects of study, etc. Instead of dealing with these issues, the very esteemed one time Dean is worried about content in a writing course. Is he? I doubt it. I doubt that all of his experiences really project this to the foreground. Instead, this topic, like “Can Johnny Write,” “Our students Are Behind the Rest of the World,” “Kids Watch Too Much TV/Kids Don’t Read Enough” etc. are much catchier topics, cliché as they are. But clichés have always dominated first year writing instruction, from the textbooks to the popular perception of argumentation. So why should Fish rock that boat? Why indeed since the popular media has always been good to him and his image. Nah. Better to dig up a cliché and toss it out there where folks will eat it up (is this really any different than “being for family values?” in American culture during voting time?) than address what needs to be addressed.
Posted by jrice @ 10:09 AM EST [Link]
Monday, May 30, 2005
Weekend
It's green...
We shop!
Always look on the sunnyside of life.
Posted by jrice @ 10:31 AM EST [Link]
Friday, May 27, 2005
Clay Shirky writes about tagging and categories. I find much relevant here to the emerging (or me forcing a) crises in composition studies to recognize technological influence on communication. My recent discussions on the teaching_composition listserv somehow put me in position of defender of blogging (a position I don't want). But relevant to Shirky's argument is the question of the categorical systems we've come to assume as natural; Shirky's examples include the Dewey Decimal system/Yahoo and their out-datedness. I'd add to his practical in-use examples the conceptual systems we accept. Notably, in my field, that conceptual system revolves around the question: what is writing?
It isn't the ideas in a book that have to be in one place -- a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.
There is an analogy here to writing in general, or to the idea of writing. That writing might be any number of things at once seems still an unrecognizable concept to many, or to many who teach writing. The category of writing in the writing classroom (since Braddock et. al) has been student writing, whose limited focus and definition creates the tautology of what writing should encompass or how it is generated.
In this scheme:
Writing = X
The Web = X
The writer = the student
The first two categories are shaped by the third.
In that shaping, these categories become fixed and rigid.
This rigidity doesn't mean we shouldn't have categorization. But it does point to how problematic it can be to invoke change (change in meaning, structure, application, category, apparatus, etc.). It also can prevent or greatly limit innovation and invention (at the meta and pedagogical levels). Thus, if the category of writing remains in place no matter what, then any interest in using a new medium (let's just say weblogs for now) ends up only replicating the category's ontological status. Shirky:
One of the biggest problems with categorizing things in advance is that it forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make predictions about the future.
Here, I hear the teaching_composition listserv opposition to weblogs: I don't see how this will matter to my classroom. In other words: “I don’t see the relevance because my categorical rigidity forces me into the position of mind reading, and if that mind reading cannot find immediate usage, then the whole project you put forward is faulty.”
Ah. Mind reading. I must force the new object into the old category (echo of McLuhan) or I can't buy into this new definition/usage.And this is where del.icio.us seems important. Del.icio.us is not the end all application, but a possible ontological shift in categorization (with applications not yet invented) whose premise resides in allowing categorical determinations to be made later, and to overlap. Shirky notes that in del.icio.us:
We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps to this degree". That is a really profound change.
Semblance. Barthes hit upon the relevance of semblance to meaning making in Camera Lucida. Semblance upsets the fixity of categorization. In this move, we go from “writing is” to “writing is sort of/kind of…..” No doubt that move also upsets pedagogical imperatives which rely heavily on rigidity for all kinds of reasons (in practice institutionally, of course. But also because of how the stable category is a method of control). To allow the categorical system we depend on to change, much would have to be done ideologically. I really don’t see that happening except in random moments, among few theorists and teachers. Still, much to think about here. And there is enough to think about that if more instructors would take this thinking seriously, they may find better ways to work with the media-populace they teach (i.e. no longer stuffing the irrelevance of topic sentence/hierarchical thinking in the space which functions less and less in such ways).
Posted by jrice @ 02:35 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Detroit Eats Its Young
So many insightful posts about the mayor's idiocy are out there. Detroit Blog does a great job. dETROITfUNK's video says so much. Notes From Far Away discusses the lost doorway.
To quote Funkadelic, Detroit eats its young. Without a past, there is no city. The larger issue is, what does Kwame really think he is achieving by erasing the physical past of the city? His own corruption? His own impotence? If I can't succeed, I will tear down the walls and bring the place tumbling with me? Is this mayoral suicide at its best?
Posted by jrice @ 11:25 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Miles
Today is Miles Davis' birthday. WDET is treating us to Miles throughout the day. I first picked up a Miles record by chance in high school. Flipping through the bins at Peaches Records and Tapes, I picked out Kind of Blue for no reason. These are the kinds of accidental moments that seem eerie. Out of all the records to choose, why this one? The smoothest and most celebrated of all of Miles’ work, Kind of Blue is haunting in it appeal to arrogance and love simultaneously. To start with the best should lead to later disappointment, But it didn’t. Some time later I put aside the ‘50s and ’60s stuff and started listening to the freakish music Miles put out by the late ‘60s early ‘70s: In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. In some ways, this is Miles at his best: Funky, obscure, dissonant, troubling, interrupted, haunting. I like this Miles because it breaks the rules about what jazz should do; like Sun Ra or Ornette Coleman, this sound irritates at times, gets you up at others. By Tutu Miles is no longer Miles anymore. He’s too placid. The only raspy thing left in him is his voice (what a voice; he should have sang like Chet Baker). I would like to hear WDET shift from the Miles Ahead stuff they’re doing now and rip it up a bit with “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
Posted by jrice @ 03:00 PM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Documenting Detroit
For an advanced writing course I'll be teaching this Fall, I plan on doing "Documenting Detroit." The idea will be to create documentaries on Detroit, either text or web-based (all depends on our success in getting labs set up in time with appropriate software). We'll use the documentary genre to think about our own relationships to place. Each project will work from an anecdote about Detroit (each writer telling the story of his/her moment in a specific part of the city) and extend outward through an examination of a place within the city (research on place motivating the project - how does the history/event/encounter with this place overlap with me?). I'll probably assign Bill Nichols' Introduction to Documentary for context on the rhetoric of documentaries. But for Detroit readings, I'm thinking of only using websites and online readings (and some online video documentaries I've also marked as well for examples). In my del.icio.us bookmarks I've started collecting ideas. There are also some fantastic weblogs (look to the blogroll) that will be assigned daily reading. If you come across anyting you feel is relevant, feel free to pass it on.
Posted by jrice @ 09:23 PM EST [Link]
Sunday, May 22, 2005
S.A.T.
After coming back from our road trip last week, I found at least 50 or so emails from our ever dominant listserv speaking about a latest S.A.T. brouhaha (something recently published in the New York Times). I keep pledging to myself not to think too much about it, but I still come back to this furor over and over again. The compositionists want to argue against the S.A.T.: "It doesn't demonstrate real writing." "We need tests which allow for revision!" "The test is too short." "It lets students make stuff up." Then come the debates about whether nor not folks really write in 20 or so minutes, who are these popular writers who dare to judge us, what can we do to respond? All because the S.A.T. is being framed as a device which, especially now that it has a specific writing section, will help students be better writers.
And here's where I find the biggest flaw in these arguments. No one, on either side of this so-called debate, seems to recognize or want to recognize that the S.A.T. is not a teaching device. It doesn't teach folks how to write, whatever the time frame allowed for or subject matter students write about. It is a device created in order to predict future ability in the general notion of the university (general, because not all universities are equal in what they offer or quality of offerings). Studies have challenged that claim (my own experience taking the damn thing challenges that claim), but regardless, there is one other factor ignored: not only does this test not predict future ability, it is designed to go along with a series of preparation courses run by Kaplan which are meant to show students how to "trick" the test. Those who can afford to take the prep courses do better than those who can't.
So, I wish my colleagues in the field would simply enact their own power in this game. The answer is not in how to formulate a better public presence and argue the claim better to a general, non-academic audience. No. The answer is to no longer recognize the test. We, the academics, give the Kaplan/College Board the power to operate. You don't like what they do? Take that power back. Imagine high school students no longer required to have S.A.T. scores for university acceptance. That's the end of the College Board and Kaplan.
If it were only so easy. To begin to think like that, however, may mean a lot of folks will lose their financial interests in this game. Pity. Besides the financial corruption, I do think that the S.A.T. serves as diversion (ah, here's the cult studies bit, no?) from real issues. It's easy to get folks riled up over something inconsequential so that they don't pay attention to issues that are pressing (American politics anyone? Islamic uproar over a Newsweek story anyone?). It’s also easy to ignore certain topics which make composition studies uncomfortable (new media, technology) so that concentration can be placed on the heavily familiar refrain of the S.A.T. That is a more serious and depressing pity.
Posted by jrice @ 11:55 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Beer
After getting Jenny set up with the admin stuff at Penn State, we stopped into Zeno's - across from campus - for a beer. It sits in the basement of a building. Nice and moody. Only one other person was there. But it was two in the afternoon, after all.
I had been reading about Victory's Hop Devil before our trip - it's the draft in the pic. Jenny opted for a Brooklyn EIPA. Good all around. Jenny's neighbor, Ralph - also at Penn State - took us to Otto's for beers as well. Nice brew pub on the far end of town (where all the franchises are). But fantastic beer. Had a very nice and hoppy IPA there.
Earlier, we came upon this in the street:
Ah, casual luxury.
Then a guy without a shirt on stood on top of this downtown mural:
Soon, I will return to my regular polemics against the academy and such. For now, the blog becomes a home movie sort of set up - LOOK AT OUR VACATION PICS. Selma and Pattie style.
Posted by jrice @ 12:10 PM EST [Link]
Friday, May 20, 2005
Back Again
We got back yesterday from State College, PA. Small town, America. The place where you can only buy beer by the case. So we got a couple of cases of PA beer: Penn Weizen and a Victory sample case (had some of the IPA in a bar near campus, damn fine hoppy beer). More on that later. Some pics as well.
In the meantime, my article "The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by Any Other Means of Technology" just came out in Composition Studies. Shout out to the journal for putting it out there.
Posted by jrice @ 09:48 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Five
John asks:
CALLING ALL TEACHERS: I'm asking all the teachers who read this blog to identify the five most important issues or concerns you face when planning a writing course.
Lesseee....
For meme's sake...I'll borrow Steve's list of questions (since he just got a little Inside Higher Ed linkage):
1) How does the course in question fit into the "big picture" of the program?
No clue. I'm suspicious of "big picture" goals anyway. Too Taylorist. There is a middle ground between Taylorism and anarchy, of course, and so I note that "goal" as the general teaching of rhetorical production, typically for new media. That said, I identify a problem (problematic!) and try to work around that for a semester with usually 10-20 students.
2) What do other people do who teach the course, and what do they expect out of the course?
Sometimes I look for analogy. Most time, because I never feel anybody's doing the "idea" like me, I don't. That's true for my great passion, first year writing, as well. Invention is appropriation, but often I appropriate from unlikely sources (the uncanny!) as well as sources that have implicit (not explicit) ties to digital culture and rhetoric.
3) Where do I want students to be at the end of the term?
Ready to wow others with the great linking/mixing skills they just earned their chops on.
4) What's the basic "point" or "argument" I want to make in the class?
Except for MLA interviews, no need to limit yourself to a basic point. We don't need no basic points! Rhetoric is too complex for such things. We look to encounter ideas, and to develop those encounters into writing.
5) How is it all going to fit and what will I have to cut?
If I cut a book, it's usually because it went out of print. Never much for assigning tons of reading, I like the model I learned from my mentor, Ulmer, four-five texts which teach us instructions for how to work with the problem the course poses. Reading for invention, not analysis.
As for assignments, one solid piece of writing is plenty. Folks who assign 18 and 19 year olds four-five essays are kidding themselves. I write professionally. If I can get one essay written in 16 weeks, that's great. And you think a freshmen writer can do four? Sure, she can. Four crappy essays. I seldom have to cut an assignment.
Posted by jrice @ 02:16 PM EST [Link]
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Trip Part II
On the road, you may need to blow things up.
That's why we stopped in Boomland!
They also sell condoms there! How about that "Freedom Tickler!" That'll teach the damn terrorists!
"Must blog Shiva's crapcident..."
"Stupid humans and their stupid hotels and need for toilets..."
The infamous Wendy's coffee that ruined my 15 year streak of keeping out of fast food joints.
Later, I caught Jenny eating salsa out of the jar. No chips.
"Home of the famous Fried Bologna Sandwich"
Posted by jrice @ 09:28 AM EST [Link]
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Trip Part I
Yee-Haw! We on the road!
Mmmm. Bugs.
Gas Station Pastries.
At least someone liked 'em.
Clinton and Jenny share a name.
Baby you can drive my car.
Yeah, Baby! Kick out the Jams!
Posted by jrice @ 12:52 PM EST [Link]
Back
We got in around midnight last night. Will post pics today or tomorrow.
Highlights:
Not content to have crapped in her bed, Shiva then pees in the towel Jenny put down for her in the cage.
Jenny makes me break my 15 year streak of not stepping inside a fast food joint. I have to go in and get her a coffee.
One hour delay in Illinois so three guys can lay some patch on the highway and one woman can hold up a "SLOW" sign.
We dig everyone's CDs on the drive.
We stop at Boomland! It's HAMTASTIC.
We listen to a pompous audio book of some guy lamenting his spoiled upbringing. It's called something like The Disappointment Artist. Disappointing indeed. We did learn over and over again that this guy's parents were hippies.
The great cat stand off when we arrive. Koom and Shiva give each other evil eyes and move to claim their own space.
Posted by jrice @ 08:11 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Arkansas
Early morning wake up. Long day of driving ahead. Highlight of yesterday was Shiva crapping in her bed in the cage. That, after a two hour attack of screams of horror. MEOW MEOW MEOW MEEEEEEEOWWWWWWWW. This morning, she finds the bathtub worth visiting - while I shower.
We got to Arkansas last night, made some nice sandwiches (we bring our own food!) and topped 'em off with a sweet Dogfish 60 Minute IPA.
Now if only this dang Motel 8 had some good coffee.
I hear through the webvine as well that my new nemesis is complaining elsewhere in cyberspace about "my attacks" on his bad scholarship. Wow. If you're out there reading (and note that I politely do not name you by your NAME), give it up. And grow up. Come back with a retort to the critique, not with your continuing name calling.
Let's get on the road, dudes. Detroit awaits.
Posted by jrice @ 08:26 AM EST [Link]
Saturday, May 7, 2005
More SAT
Making the rounds, NPR interviews MIT's Les Perelman on the SAT and its problems. Les does do a good job critiquing the SAT, but not for the problems related to timed-writing assessment. Instead, he critiques the SAT's approach: the de-emphasis on facts, the dependence on the 5 paragraph essay model, etc.
But....Perelman still wants an exam for writing. He asks for: An all day affair, "two lengthy pieces of writing," time to "revise," ability to have readings ahead of time, etc.
I feel like the only person who thinks that whatever the flavor, the test does nothing. I'm a fairly educated person. I have a fancy degree. I'm a pretty good writer. I wrote a writing textbook. Sit me down for 40 minutes or two hours. Odds are, I won't do much of anything of value. That's not how I work. Take a piece of writing I produce in this time period, look it over, give an assessment: "HE SUCKS." No doubt. But it's not an assessment of how I write. It's an assessment of how I wrote under these very specific conditions. Whatever the timed test, very little is achieved. The timed test is a state of false consciousness. It reflects a desire to be more like the other disciplines which test achievement, often in measurable ways. To admit that writing is not measurable the way mathematics or certain scientific studies are, that would be a better achievement for all of us.
Posted by jrice @ 06:02 PM EST [Link]
House
Posted by jrice @ 02:25 PM EST [Link]
Friday, May 6, 2005
Shout Out
Shout out from Craig on his latest Rhizome Blog Report.
I think Craig forgot to setup his own blog too....
:)
Posted by jrice @ 11:17 AM EST [Link]
Thursday, May 5, 2005
Lil West Side
Posted by jrice @ 03:31 PM EST [Link]
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
Why Don't You Listen
Putting the remix into critical practice.
I borrow the image from Brendan to note a recent experiment in disciplinary niceness. A week or so ago, I picked up on Collin and Will's thread on Udell and spread the joy to WPA. I posed the post nicely, and framed it as a current Web-response to emerging forms of professional writing (emergences far beyond the traditional teach the genre: memo, proposal, report). Udell, like other “popular” writers on technology and writing (Steven Johnson, David Weinberger) is seeing technology and writing as something outside of instrumentality (which tool do I use) and genre (memo anybody? Website for non-profit?). There is a lesson there for composition studies and its stagnant curriculum.
My question to myself was: would the repetitive threads on mocking student mistakes (uh, didn't Macrorie jump on that practice about 30 years ago) and machine grading yield to a fairly intellectual discussion on some of the issues Udell noted regarding writing and technology, points that are not so much instrumental as logic-based. Could the list shift to intellectual discussion without coping out (“technology is beyond us”) or shrugs of the shoulders (“who cares anyway”)? Not that folks need to agree with me or anybody. Instead, could there be a discussion?
The experiment, of course, failed. No one listened. No one – to quote the continued mantra I critiqued previously – “paid attention.”
I am becoming more and more convinced that this field is going to die shortly. Its death will be triggered by a heightened regression into anti-intellectualism and a preference for positivist disciplinary identity. Composition studies will become irrelevant. Its focus will be on sending kids through the system and backing up that movement with so-called relevant data (“We taught X amount of students Y amount of things via Z amount of teachers at a mean score of Q”) that has little to no connection to writing within the digital apparatus. The emerging concerns with connectivity, networking, juxtaposition, etc which mark digital writing and thinking will remain ignored. And what do the rest of us do? Complain, gripe, get angry, blah blah blah. But really, not much more than what we currently do. We got the blog space, the occasional article, the here and there response on a listserv, but you can’t do much more than that. The revolution will not be web-ified because the revolution probably won’t happen, or it won’t happen until the practices are so ubiquitous (though I think they already are) that even composition’s greatest hits of administration can no longer ignore them.
Posted by jrice @ 11:02 AM EST [Link]
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
Imaginary Road Trips Part II
Posted by jrice @ 10:39 AM EST [Link]
Monday, May 2, 2005
Imaginary Rhetoric Part IX
Posted by jrice @ 08:26 PM EST [Link]
SAT
Dennis Baron, whose work is usually insightful and to the point, writes on the SAT in the Chronicle (archived at WPA-L).
Baron makes good points throughout, from the business-dominated aspect of the SAT to the lack of experience or professionalization among the so-called graders. Always key to SAT critique is its lack of focus on actual writing; instead it tests ability to negotiate a scheme we've come to know as the "five paragraph essay" whose roots are not in writing but in labor (finding a way for unskilled and cheap labor to teach material that they do not know).
More specifically, the five-paragraph theme, or any other formulaic approach to writing, will not help improve the writing of either high-school or college students: It won't help those who can't produce intelligible, written sentences to form them better, and it won't teach those not used to thinking analytically to analyze either their writing or the subject that they're writing about.
All on the money. But....and of course I must throw in the "but"....who is really complicit in this game of paying out big bucks to Kaplan and the College Board to assess students in inefficient and nonsensical ways? Us. Where are the decisions to reject the SAT straight out? Where are the WPAs gathering voices and making decisions to no longer recognize the SAT? Where is WPA momentum and strength in numbers calling for an end to a practice we all recognize as a sham?
Chirp chirp.
Chirp chirp.
Silence.
Instead of saying “enough,” we hear calls to better understand and work with the College Board. Instead of saying “this is crap,” we hear ways to join the ranks of SAT graders (ah, yes, more mindless work for us) and help them understand how to assess properly. And guess what, kids? It don’t work. I’ll leave aside for now the whole issue of new media thinking and all that jazz (which, of course, the SAT does not even approach, since its creation emerges from another kind of thinking – mostly Fordist). Instead, I put it on the admins who gripe about how much this dang thing sucks, but who continue to use it anyway.
Wal-Mart thinking? I.e.: “Yeah, I know its exploitive, but it sure is cheap.”
Yup.
Posted by jrice @ 01:51 PM EST [Link]
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