b l o g o s

techno-teach

This term I am teaching a newish course called Liberal Arts 101H: Rhetoric and Civic Life. It combines oral, written, and visual communication. How does it do that, you ask? By means of the digital. I will not touch paper this term, and yet my students will probably write double or triple what they write in a typical FYC course.

The course has two platforms: our classooms (in the plural because we have two different locations we meet--a regular classroom on Tuesday and Thursday, and a computer lab on Friday for our short lab session), and our blogs. Penn State has a typepad-based blog system. It isn't perfect--in fact I still have a damn rooster as the lead image--but we are all starting to get the hang of it.

I would position my technology skills directly at the midline of some imaginary spectrum, where the one side is very, very, very advanced (this side includes my buddy Spencer), and the other is "what's a URL"? So I'm not particularly good at this, and it took a lot of time to re-train myself on the blog system after my parental leave. But the thing is, students are both forgiving and helpful. Today in class, for example, we did some collective troubleshooting on the blog comment features. Two students, J and S, showed us how to allow people to comment. (But, "Air Jordan Shoes" or "Gucci bags," if you spam me and my students, I will lose it.)

I imagine the chaos of such collective finding-our-way would be offputting to a lot of teachers. But if you like to think of teaching as learning, then this might be a cool direction for you. Yesterday's class, for example, met at one of the campus's multimedia commons labs. We had a tour and an introduction to garage band (during which S and R laid down some goofy tracks), and to the video recording studio with a green screen (how cool is that?), the collaborative spaces, little cubicle-like rooms equipped with overstuffed chairs and/or conference tables, and more recording and editing equipment, and the whispering booths, little soundproof booths which are for recording podcasts, not for making out. And I learned about all of this right along with my students.

The chaos of getting settled in to the course is already giving way to focused collaboration. The students had a draft workshop today, conducted in our computer lab, using the blog comment features to respond to peer writing.

This class, in essence, is one semester-long experiment. I am looking forward to seeing where it ends up.

 

 

 

where there's a dissertation there's a whippet

(ongoing series)

post-halloween, post- D.S.T. seminar

office hours

I held two extra office hours today, and I'm so glad I did. I got to talk with three smart grads, two of whom are already hammering out topics for their final project, and one of whom wanted me to take a look at his RSA abstract.

And when folks weren't here, I got a chance to tinker with a little teaching grant proposal, copy a section from a rare greek book that I have to return to the farflung place that lent it to me this summer, fiddle with my new psu website, AND write a blog entry. How productive is that? 

Wildly. Even the little sprog is kicking around, seemingly with excitement.

where there's a dissertation there's a whippet, 2009

Longtime readers will recall this genre from 2007, the tridissertation year: here, here, and here.

This year there's one (whew), and I just finished it. It has a darned good last word too.

a fleeting staple memory

When I was in kindergarten, I sometimes got to come up to the split first and second  grade because I could read pretty well. The teacher was a little on the mean side and also seemed to forget that I was a fair bit younger than most of the kids in the classroom and would ask me to assist her with various classroom tasks--like I was a tiny research assistant. Once she gave me a bunch of papers to staple together, and I went off, happy to have my little task, but also a little bit unsure about which papers needed to be together. So I attempted to staple the entire stack of papers together--it was about a half-inch thick. After much wrestling with a big industrial-size stapler, the likes of which I had never seen, let alone used, I ended up with a bloody finger and a set of papers with seriously mangled corners. The teacher yelled at me. My finger hurt.

I--and my finger--have thought of this long ago tiny trauma several times over the course of the weekend as I grade and then print my grad students' papers with my comments. The papers that exceed 25 pages prove to be the most difficult to get a staple through, but it's also the case that my stapler sucks ass. Apologies to those of you whose papers will arrive in your mailboxes with so many mangled corners (the worst of these are pictured here). I hope you'll be more understanding than that grouchy, mean old teacher.

speaking/writing/performing

A PhD advisee of mine, C, did her exams yesterday. The exams in Writing Studies are oral (the exams in Communication—formerly Speech Communication—are written, but this curious transposition is a matter for another post).  C, more than anyone I have ever met, is a writer. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing, for starters. She wrote her way through two seminars with me, and when I say that, I mean she sat through each class, head down, scrawling in a big notebook from one end of the page to the other, top to bottom, page after page, occasionally looking up to see who was talking. This is how she learns, and I’m reasonably sure that what happens in her notebooks tilts more toward invention than transcription.

Her response papers are the reason I became very strict about length limits. They always spilled over, and she also prefers a smaller-than-usual font, which more than anything else, serves to underscore the density and liveliness of the writing. (I had to finally ask her to at least bump it up to 11-point.) Emails from C, too, tend toward the unusually long, thoughtful, and carefully crafted. The most challenging part of these exams, she and I have both known for awhile, would be that she would need to put down her pen, pull her head up, and speak rather than write. This was the cause of much anxiety for C, and has been since she first entered the program three and a half years ago.  

I don’t know the details about her exam preparation, except that she read or re-read probably 250 or so books and articles in the past several months. I’m fairly certain that writing featured prominently in her preparation—I rarely saw her in recent months without the 3-inch-thick notebook she brought back from Portugal, which seemed to be getting thicker.

Listening to C in her exam yesterday, I realized that she speaks like a writer, like she writes—in full, vivid, paragraphs, her answers forming something like narrative arcs. Plato talks about writing taking the place of memory, and whether he is right about that or not, it is definitely the case that writing facilitates memory. C buttressed her answers with quotations, illustrations, descriptions (my favorite description was when she compared reading one particularly troubling scholarly book to watching a house burn down—“at once fascinating and horrifying”), weaving answers on the spot to our pointed questions.

C's answers brought the seventeenth-century chironomist John Bulwer as close as he has ever been to composition researcher Janet Emig, thickly described psych-lab experiments that suggest gesture does not just convey thought but helps constitute it, and explained to us precisely and without hesitation why Descartes ought not be so easily tossed out with cartesianism.  Toward the end of the exam, I wondered whether it was possible to speak in a 10-point font. If it is, she was doing it, only instead of filling the page, her words filled the room. No squinting was necessary.

scattershot 10: not enough time to process

1. Daniel Gross's book, The Secret History of Emotion, is an important one. A few of us in my seminar felt like he beat up on science unnecessarily toward the beginning of the book, and that surely there is more to say about scientific accounts of emotion than that they are reductive, but others made a good case that he had to do that in order to make room for his intervention on behalf of the humanities. (By the way, having a class full of productive critics totally rocks.) The end of the book moves toward a much tempered critique of work about emotions that relies on scientific findings, but the imbalance is noticeable and off-putting. We did wonder how Gross might respond to recent work in rhetoric that makes use of some of the very scientific work he critiques without ever losing sight of what rhetoric brings (and must bring!) to the table (e.g., Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse).

When a fellow Aristotle scholar saw Gross on my syllabus, he said "you know that book isn't really about Aristotle," I was all "I know!" But approaching it  from the depths of book II of A's Rhetoric makes it very difficult to read as a book about anything but Aristotle (despite its focus on 17th- and 18th-c rhetoric), because of its sustained case in favor of rhetoric's usefulness for conceiving the emotions as active energy that happens between people. My class has developed the parlance of "dispositions on dispositions," which is well supported by the first lines of Book II. Aristotle hangs with Judith Butler as Gross's heroes, a pairing that no doubt deserves its own post.

Since I don't have time to say more, I do welcome comments on this or other parts of the book--I know some of you have read it thoroughly (and this goes for people in my class who definitely have and other scholars who I believe have), so do post away. 

2. My visit to IU was fast, fun, and pretty intense. When I first started in this business, I was not all that good at thinking on my feet, but now I feel a lot better equipped for doing that, in part because I've had a lot of practice, and in part because I acknowledge that no answer will ever perfectly address a question because of the intractable problem of other minds and the inherent difficulty of knowing where a question is really coming from (and the strictures that prevent us from saying that on the spot). But/and so it's a good idea to check in with the questioner's nonverbal cues and to keep checking back in verbally (and nonverbally--with looks and gestures) with the questioner even in the midst of other answers in order to keep interesting lines of discussion alive.

3. I have only once been stumped silent by a question, and so was quite relieved when the questioner interrupted the silence and said something along the lines of "Oh! Did I ask about the implications this research holds for ethos? I meant pathos!!" (Those of you from Purdue probably remember this.)

4. Even though I have just finished an entire book about Kenneth Burke, I still find it difficult to sustain a conversation with someone who *only* uses Burkean terminology. Now, this might just be my problem, but I still think it's important to make an effort to break out of the terminology. (This problem is not of course confined to Burkeans, but also to Deleuzians.)

5. When you are doing a presentation of some sort, if you're lucky, there will be a question or two that will "stick" and end up moving the whole project (or the next one) in an unanticipated direction. You might not realize this for several months or years, but it is still very cool. As a scholar I chase that feeling.

6. As an audience member and a student, nodders sometimes bug me (I say this as a partially reformed nodder), but as a speaker and a teacher, oh lordie, nodding and its bodily partners--hastily writing something down, low rumbles of assent, even good eye contact--are oh, so welcome.

7. I had a good conversation with someone this week about how the best classes are often the ones you're least prepared for. It strikes me that this only works if you are not expecting the class to go well because you haven't prepared. It also strikes me that I might test this hypothesis this week, since I'm flying back on the day of my seminar meeting.

8. Moderating a long discussion (which I did for Tuesday's panel on the Media and the Election) is kind of awesome but also a teeny bit stressful because I don't want to play favorites, and it is impossible to tell whose hand goes up first when they all shoot straight into the air. 

9. If you have not seen David Sedaris on his current tour or had the good fortune of knowing people who have recounted to you the highlights, I suggest you read his piece in this week's New Yorker on undecided voters, like, right now.

10. Come on, November 4!!!! I America can't wait much longer.

something is very strange

At the beginning of the semester, I had a problem in my seminar. Everyone wanted to talk too much, and there wasn't enough time. Grad students started emailing me to see if we could meet longer (I checked; we couldn't). I blogged about that problem here. In my request for a seminar next year, I have tried to remedy the problem by following the advice of my sabbaticaling colleague who left a comment suggesting that I request a 2.5 hour seminar. I also set up a facebook group.

Last week, we actually got through most everything for the first time all semester, and I started thinking that the early enthusiasm might be settling a bit; everyone's tired. It is, after all, mid-term.

And then this morning I got this week's batch of response papers. A few people went over my (strict!) two page limit. I scolded them, sent emails asking them not to do that any more. And then I read the things, and damn, were they good. But still, this problem is kind of like the one we had with the duration of each seminar meeting--people's exuberance is making them spill past the limits. It's very strange.

Today's topic is Daniel Gross's The Secret History of Emotion, and he's got everybody--including me--all stirred up. I think I better show up early.

frenesis: duration and pace in graduate seminars

One of my departments (English) has shorter seminars than the other, by a full hour. Since I was originally appointed solely in English and therefore taught my first five or so seminars as 2 hour seminars (really 1 hour 50 minutes), I never really noticed. This was until I taught a seminar in Communication, where they are 2 hours, 50 minutes, which is by my sights more standard. Now that I'm in my first short seminar following my first long one, I feel quite pressed for time.

Last year when we were doing teaching requests, I noticed that the request form in English had the option to pop the seminar out to 3 hours. But knowing that this would cause logistical problems for the English grads--namely mine would overlap with the two hour seminar now slated for just before mine--and also asking myself "why would I work an extra hour? Why would the grad students want to sit there for an extra hour?" I opted not to do it. But I'm having some regrets.

Two hours might well be enough if the class had 7 or 8 medium talkers plus me. But this one has fifteen enrolled plus me, and I do believe that everyone said something yesterday, which is kind of awesome on its own, but we it also meant that we spent, like, an hour on the first line if the Rhetoric.

And then there's the problem of whether or not to break. Last week we motored right through the break, but yesterday we took a quick, four-minute break, even though we were kind of steaming ahead right about then. And a few students even stayed around during the break and we sort of continued having class, talking about the ancient legal system and how we need to give the sophists a little love (I promise! We will!), which was quite cool but also a little strange. Oh well. It's a good problem to have--too much interesting stuff to discuss, too many smart people to discuss it all, not enough time--but I'm definitely thinking that 3 hours might have been preferable.

I'd love to hear what folks think about the issue, including anyone who knows the institutional history of these seminar lengths, and especially grad student takes on one or the other, on class pacing, etc. Yesterday, it did seem a bit like conversational double dutch, which I find energizing, but I imagine it can be frustrating for others.