Compositionism

last class of the day, 6-to-almost-8pm, i'm tired, my students are tired, & this is the batch that tends to make progress the most slowly and with whom i have the most ennui to fight (which is still so much less than what i'm used to that it makes me giddy): E, my heckler for his section, who always sits at the back of the room, has been complaining (albeit somewhat good-naturedly) about the details of the assignment he's working on each time i wander back to where he and his cronies sit. halfway through the period, maybe more, i make my way back there again, and he glares at me over the paper he's diligently writing on.

"this class is hardcore," he says, gesturing at the several things he's written during this meeting already. "i know," i answer cheerily. "it's a writing class. that's what we do." the next time i come back there, he's got a different comment to offer:

"i'm still having trouble starting that history paper," he says. "got any advice?"

yes, of course i have. we have lots of advice when we're hardcore.

...is when i get to tell the black students* who arrive in my classrooms shamefaced about their "bad" street- or home-grammar that their English is richly, genuinely, structurally grammatical & in some of its structures more effective and versatile than the standard written form in the textbook, which i always make sure to tell them i know because i studied it in graduate school. we swap in the language of "situational appropriateness" instead of "good" and "bad"--all of the students in my classes, they need to get better at the grammar that's "good for this purpose."

i've had a few look at me distrustfully, like i'm just blowing sunshine at them and they can't figure out why i would want to, but more of them get this look on their faces like "holy shit!" as they think through the implications of having been not wrong--having been speaking and writing a "real" grammar--their entire lives. it's my favorite classroom face ever.


*if i lived in texas or california or someplace with a larger spanish-speaking population, for example, i'm sure i'd be giving a version of this talk that related to spanglish or chicano/chicana structures; in the hills of appalachia i gave a version of it to a number of white students who spoke with the particulars of a different community English. but in the places i've lived so far, these are the students who've most often initiated the conversation by apologizing for what they assume i will perceive as their insufficiencies, and so they're the ones i've most often had the pleasure of getting to have this conversation with.

today's teaching-related post appeared in my regular lj to tell folks where i've been & try to alert a few of them who might care that this spot is here for future reference, so if i'm not on your flist and you want to see it, click my name & pop on over.

who's teaching (or administrating!) what this semester? (don't just comment, post!)

my head is killing me, the combination of florescent lights for 12 hours and then night-driving for a squinty hour of needle-lights from oncoming traffic sucks, and i'm very, very tired.

but i think i'm in love with all of my students.

i've been really, really lucky so far in my college teaching opportunities--all TA-ships except that one class with two students--to have had a lot of--a week or even two--orienting, prepping, and good quality advising before winding up in each semester's classrooms, & gearing up for tomorrow has really brought that into sharp relief.

after one meeting with my coworkers & my supervisor, & a couple hours of very informative campus-wandering that wasn't on anybody's schedule but happened because my new friend teresa is terrific (thanks to her i have a parking pass, an ID card, health insurance handouts, and at least a visual for where my office will be!), i'm going in tomorrow to teach 4 classes in rooms i've never seen, with no idea what their layout or technological capabilities might be (or even where in their legendarily maze-like building to find them). i'm meeting 88 students tomorrow & have yet to see one roster, because i'm in some of the computer systems but not all of them, & so with 12 hours to go they're still a batch-count instead of people (& i don't know why that makes so much of a difference to me, because there's nothing a list of names would tell me about them that i don't know already--they're freshmen, they're majoring in *something* they don't know much about yet, and they will be unique & fascinating people no matter what they're called. but i like names, i want human words instead of numbers, and so it adds to my un-balanced-ness). i think i've followed the right procedure to request copies of my syllabus to hand out in the morning (and handouts for wednesday's classes) but i'm not sure, so i have to go in braced for what to do with a 2-hour first-day class if i don't have a syllabus.

i think there are keys waiting for me to get me into an office that, last i heard, was a storage room for computers that weren't for my office-mate and i; ours are reputedly there but so far don't have monitors. i know where the mail room is, i think, and last time i saw it it was stuffed with office supplies, so i have faith that somebody believes i will soon have an office! i don't know if there's a fridge to put a lunch in or a microwave if i take leftovers, thought, so i'm not packing anything yet. i've been told there are cafes in a couple of the close-by buildings, but i don't know whether any of them will still be open by the time i get my first break at 4pm. i don't know how to access the campus wireless, so i won't be taking my computer tomorrow--especially as there might not be an office to leave it in. (to be entirely fair, logistics is also a significant part of this; i had email late last week saying my key(s?) were left at campus security & although nobody knew why i couldn't access electronic rosters, there were paper copies in my mailbox, but in the interest of both the environment and my economics (for the first time, too, i'm not working at a campus i can walk to), i couldn't justify a 100-mile round trip just to collect those things and prowl dark halls looking for room numbers!)

none of this is a complaint, of any kind, about the institution where i'm starting tomorrow--it's really important to me that my readers get that. the people i've met so far have been nothing but kind, interested, helpful, interesting, encouraging, and above all student-centered in their thinking & in the things we talk about, and i have no doubt that it's a good place, that i'm in good hands, that everything will eventually work out just fine, and that at the end of the year i'll be the one telling folks what a great place it is to work, just like folks have been telling me. i'm really excited about it. it's just that it's a suny school, which means in non-new-yorkers' terms that it's essentially a state-funded community college, and this is how things work. & although i've been spoiled rotten TAing for R1s, i was first, way back in the day, trained for and inducted into education in the public schools--i'm an old hand at ad-libbing, and at answering students' questions with "let me write that down so i remember to ask, and i'll get back to you."

but i know that answer, while honest and just and right, doesn't instill the same confidence as knowing how they get on the wireless, what's allowed at the library, how late the gym's open, or where to go to declare a major, complain about a roommate, inquire about counseling, get an allergy shot... things i would likely have known at tech, or even things like what the grading scale is in arts & sciences, what counts as a "pass" for a course, or what happens if they flunk. can they re-take a class? do failures & successes get averaged together? is there a "freshman rule"? & it's that part that i don't like--i don't need to have everything figured out, but i wish i knew the stuff my students were likely to want to know, so that in their messy, confusing, complicated first days, i would be a useful, stable-seeming stone of some sort, not another source of confusion. nobody wants to hear their first-ever college teacher say "i don't know either; i'm new too!"

& here's what all this has me thinking about, other than about that list of stuff i wish i knew: when i was an undergrad, i had no idea what adjuncts even were. as an adjunct, though, i'm perceiving myself as potentially being somewhat of a liability to these undergrads--surely, they'd be better off in the hands of somebody who knew what the heck was going on! so i'm wondering how much of a disadvantage the out-of-it adjunct really is to the newbie undergrad, how much i need to compensate for; i wonder if i had adjuncts, and was just so self-absorbed and trusting not to notice if they were half-prepared and clueless, or if they were so much less pervasive 15 years ago that i might have gone through school without any (or maybe my school had the resources to prep them with the same week of training the TAs got!). i wonder if my number-batch of 88 yet-unnamed bodies will be done a disservice by all of the things i won't know tomorrow. and, too, i wonder if they'll ever notice!

it's also possible, of course, that i'm stressing out about minor details because the first-day jitters i say i don't get look instead like control-freak-ism over here. wish me luck with the logistics coming together tomorrow (and a syllabus!), and wish me good faking-it juju, and envy me the cool people i get to work with (although our schedules don't have much overlap, so i may or may not actually get to see any of them)... it should be an adventure.

hi.

i know it's been a year and a half since i've put anything here, and even that was a bit of a stretch for me--it's to hard to talk about teaching, & theorize the field in ways that relate to teaching, when i'm not teaching (and i really don't personally give a rat's about theorizing about it in ways that don't... although any posters/lurkers here are certainly welcome to care in that direction more than i do!). BUT!!!

this year, i shall be teaching. 5 classes, in fact, all English 101/201 variants, and i'm really, really psyched. it's been years, and far longer than any gap of any kind i'd had since i was first let in a classroom back when i was an undergrad training to teach in middle schools, so it feels as though a weird epoch has come and (i don't actually believe it yet) will soon be gone.

actually, technically, i did teach last year, a 6 hour workshop that met on 2 saturdays and a "section" of 201 that was 2 students and i meeting over coffee once a week at Barnes and Noble, but it wasn't the same. it wasn't the crazy trenches 20+ bodies in the room all w/their own agenda stuff we do this for! so it doesn't count.

point of the matter is: as part of being excited about teaching again, i'm excited about getting to talk about teaching again, and i hope some of you lurkers are interested in striking up a conversation. for the couple posts that have trickled in since i've been paying any real attention, i'm sorry; dissertation-writing in the void is lonely and hellish and can suck the "care" out of you. but i'd like to come back, if you'll have me.

who's out there? what are you teaching? what do you love most about it?
talk to me.
tyra

Hi,

I'm new here, and hoping that this community is still alive and twitching a bit. I'm a teacher. I have taught for ten years in various settings (laboratory demonstrator, ESOL teacher, museum educator) and am now finally getting my diploma to teach secondary.

One of the tasks I have to complete for my diploma is to "demonstrate an understanding of school culture and marketing".

Now, I find this whole topic quite quixotic. School culture, yes, the combined result of how a school is based on interactions between students, teachers, school managers, government departments, parents and the wider school community, with some interactions contributing more weight as a result of power imbalances in the interactions, I get that. But marketing? In combination with school culture?

I mean, I get the idea that marketing is done to sell a set of ideas or values (culture), but why does a school need to do this?

It might be different in other countires, but in NZ, you go to the closest school and that's pretty much it unless your family is really wealthy (you go to an old, private school), fiercely religious (various denominations available), determinedly alternative (Steiner and homeschooling), or really remotely located (single-sex boarding schools or correspondence). So why do we have to market our schools?

Can anyone here give me or point me in the direction of where this idea came from and what drives it?

one of the things i'm doing for one of the chapters of this dissertation is examining a handful of popular handbooks & textbooks to look at what our assigned texts tell students about our beliefs regarding sources of authority--their own authority as writers and the authority of others that source-use in research writing seeks to invoke. doing this requires pouring over the books at a microscopic level, asking questions like "what language, exactly, do these writers use to tell students why they're citing sources in the first place?" <--do we tell them it's a way of entering into broader conversations? a way to prove we know what we know by revealing where we've been? an ass-saving shield to avoid being charged with plagiarism? (i've come across all of these portrayals, actually...)

outside of the specifics of what each writer or group of writers says about x, though, whichever-x, it has to be indicative of something inherent to the nature of these books that even skimming--let alone close reading--the handbook we've been using here for the past few years makes me wish the pages weren't waxy-shiny because i'd really like to set the thing on fire, and reading through the latest edition of Hacker makes me long for a classroom to get back into so i can put my hands on this stuff and teach some writing.

so kudos to the late DH. (xp to c&a)

I'm always fascinated by my resistance to saying the phrase, "I think you mean 'such and such a word' here," even though I will do that when a student misuses a word. I'm also interested in my desire to try to understand what my student means. When we're talking about the thesis, or lack thereof, a student will say, "I guess what I was trying to say..."

I myself try not to tell the student what she or he means, what that person was trying to say.

I cringe when I find myself imposing my meaning onto theirs.

So what the heck am I trying to do then?

I use words like, "work toward" forming a thesis; "force yourself" to sit down and write; "polish" the flow between sentences...the phrases are eluding me somewhat, but I'm sure they'll come back to me as I start my next round of grading. The point is, the language I use is often at odds with my pedagogical values. And yet, I can't stop using it. It's all I know to use when I want to talk about and teach this complicated task of writing. It's work, it's hard, it takes practice, it never comes out the way we mean...

Of course, I often start writing these days without knowing what the fsck I mean.

In theory I talk about the slipperiness of meaning -- I even talk about it with my students. But in practice, how do we acknowledge this and put it into play in the classroom? How do we move away from the discipline that's required to write and write well and into an understanding of all that writing entails.

I don't have any answers to this. Maybe if I did I would have less work to do; I don't know.

I'm sure there's lots of scholarship out there on this dilemna. Probably stuff I've read and just forgotten about. But I have come to feel that usually the articles and books on this topic end up leaving me disappointed. I don't think it's something anybody has figured their way out of.

So I'll just go on, doing what I do. At least I'll be conscious of and careful about my language. That's a start, right?

Ever get the feeling someone is f*ng with you? I have a student who I think is maybe lying, maybe not, to try to get out of something and might possibly be hurting, or attempting to hurt, some of said student's classmates in the process. But I can't know for sure. To be honest, I really don't give a f*ck, but I would like to be as fair as possible in this situation to all involved. If this person really didn't do what she was supposed to do, I don't want the other students to be affected by it. I'm also pretty frustrated that the conditions were even possible for this situation to occur, and a large part of that is my fault. I'm always learning how I'll do things differently, and hopefully better, next semester, so I guess this is one of those instances. It's funny how something new happens each semester that I could never have predicted. If this is my only unforeseeable event, then I'm okay with that. Currently I'm feeling that tightness I get in my chest when I'm pissed off and don't feel like I have any control over the situation, but I know this will pass and I will get over it. The only thing I can control is my reaction to the situation, so that is what I should focus on.

Aaaaahhhh...deep breath....

Okay, feeling better now.

I feel bad that this is my only post to this composition forum and it has to be about such a minor thing. I would really like to be posting deep, valuable thoughts and ideas here, but, alas, my head hasn't been in composition as much as I would like it to have been. Actually, it's sort of been up theory's ass lately. An odd place to find myself in, to be sure. But there is some composition in there as well, and I feel confident that I will find myself back at that place eventually.

M'kay. Enough late-night rambling.

(xp to c&a)

3 down, ? to go...

if i pass the 3 written exams i've turned in, all that's left between me & wandering around chicago with a curious lightness of step that i'd love to have protecting me from the cold while i get to say "i'm abd @ syracuse" whenever i introduce myself is an oral defense.

which could be a great-of-china-kind-of-wall or just a conversation; i don't really know how they do things here. i suppose sooner rather than later (::knocks on wood about that::) i'll find out. in the meantime, a few of my students hate me for having given them no feedback on their work in like weeks, and the rest of them are going to hate me as soon as i abruptly become one of those teachers who pays all kinds of attention to them, just when they were thinking they'd get to spend the whole semester texting each other on their phones in the lab under the gentle gaze of my negligence:

it's time to get back to my real work.

1 to go, & then (assuming i passed all 3, which is a big assumption to be making right now & not one i'd recommend, but feel free to perform any good luck rituals you can think of in my favor to tip that probability in the right direction) orals at some point the scheduling of which promises to be thoroughly complicated by "spring" break and 4Cs and THEN maybe i'll be done w/the exam-taking part & then i'll be able to start on--ah, shit, i'm supposed to write the conference papers BEFORE the conference! oh, yeah, & my students turned papers in over a week ago that i haven't looked at yet. but the take-home question is sitting in front of me & it's a heck of a paper to write, so it's once of those terrific moral choices--who do i neglect & sell short first, me, or them?

>sigh<

in understatement: this is totally unfun.

today's post in the reading-note dumping-zone that's what's become of cinnaster:

---

300 laps, finis.

ask me today, & i'm done.

(there's 1 ERIC document still on my list that i haven't yet tried to ferret out of the library's microfilm collection, 1 book out on recall, & 1 book lost that illiad's supposed to be acquiring for me, but none of them are HERE. i have read everything that is here. all of it. OMG.)

300 is the ballpark # i told fellow study-for-comps-ers robotapocalypse & jason for how many pages of notes i was going to end up with for this project. 300 is today's page-count for the word file i backed up the notes from this blog into.

48 "books" in collaborative writing, 27 in authorship, & 27 in genre.

boo-yah.

---

6-hour blind-entry exam is 10 days from today. a week after that, the 3-hour i'll have the question in advance for, & a week after that the 10-12 page take-home is due. sometime (undisclosed) after that the oral defense part, & while i'm prepping for that i'll be writing conference papers b/c oh yeah, CCCCs is in mid-march & it'll be mid-march by then.

1. I have a student who has been notoriously late and unattentive (or is it inattentive?) in class all semester. When I say "inattentive" I mean there is body (and that is sort of a long shot) but not anything else. Said student has not submitted practically all of the daily assignments this semester, has not turned in papers on time, and all of the papers that have been turned in have been Fs. When I've gone to comment on drafts, this student never had a draft complete enough to receive valuable feedback. All of this leads up to the fact that this student has informed me of a close friend's death, and the student is planning to turn in a late paper, thinking the death will excuse its tardiness. This is tough for me, because I really do try to be sensitive to the personal experiences that these students go through in what have to be some highly tumultuous years of their lives. But we've been working on this paper for a long time; some students turned theirs in before Break.

I am planning to remain consistent with my policy and take the warranted ten points off every day that it is late. Am I being too harsh? Am I not being understanding? Knowing that the student is probably not going to do well on this assignment anyway and that the grades as a whole are already very low, should I be more flexible?

I think, as the years go by, I am valuing consistency more and more. And I am willing to work with students who contact me right away with personal problems (and that is stated in the syllabus). But this student is informing me after-the-fact.

These decisions are so tough. I'll be so glad when the semester is over.


2. Speaking of being glad when the semester is over....

Ever have a student who you suspect is plagiarizing, but you can't find an original source on the web or in the library?

Have you ever checked out EVE2? -- The Essay Verification Engine. I'm seriously considering spending the $30 and getting myself a copy. If anyone else has used this software, I would love to hear if it was something you would recommend.

Here's my philosophy on trying to grade a paper when you suspect that the student didn't write it: It's like someone forcing you to eat shit and pretend that it's cake. And then making you say "yum yum" while you eat it.

read (okay, skim, reading what's bold-faced & whatever else you need for context, unless you really have the time to care) this and then tell me how/why our jobs, goals, wishes, dreams, etc. in this field and for our students are still worthwhile?

i'm not trying to bring everybody down here. i need some ways to protest. this makes too much sense to me. of course, all truly downer-versions of history/reality always do. it's easy to buy into a "things fall apart" mentality that overlooks all the things that aren't falling.

i'm going to go grade some summaries now, & urge my students to produce "more detail, more examples, more thought," and i'm going to do it with a yet-lingering belief that "these efforts" are NOT "rhetorically meaningless," but that's just stubbornness right now. Williams makes too damn much sense that i don't want to hear.

who's gonna take him down?

to be more of a hard-ass and give students who do not put the effort in fewer chances to play catch-up and make my life a logistical nightmare, to let the consequences of inaction fall of the shoulders of the inactive rather than on my own, to just hand out "F"s for work not done, to follow the deadline-speech with a genuine disinterest in the excuses and the crises and the meltdowns and all the many many reasons why.

in the meantime, though, i'll keep arguing against that eventuality. because every time i lay the smack-down down instead of bending a little further, stretching another "dead"line (lukewarm wavy mark?), making another allowance, facilitating another do-over, an opportunity for learning is lost. and i want to think of myself as a teacher, not a police-officer, an enforcer, a disciplinarian. sure, it would be easier to teach the rest of them if the slackers had a little damn discipline, & somebody has to teach it to them, but i'm supposed to teach all of them. and i was hired to teach them writing, not responsibility. and when i say "no" and shut the door, they have no reason to write. when i say "oh, all right" and yield yet again, they write for me. they write. they learn more about writing.

that's my job.

i don't get them. i love students, classrooms, new people to engage with. i'm a little worried about the usual stupid stuff--it'll be the wrong room after all, i won't be able to find where i'm supposed to be, the copier will explode at the last minute & i'll be without syllabi--but thinking about walking into the rooms & facing the rows of faces i'll have to cajole & inspire & entertain all semester... nothing.

here's why:

my first-year teaching experience was as a sixth grade teacher in a middle school in southern virginia. on the first day of class, the seventh & eighth graders, who presumably knew their way around already, went to homeroom to get started, and all of the sixth-grade students coming out of 4 or 5 local elementary schools who had never been in a place this huge before in their little small-town lives were herded into the auditorium, where the teachers sat in the front row, facing the stage, not the students. we had not seen class lists. they had not seen names. none of us knew anything. the principal walked onto the stage, made some speech about a new school & a new year & new opportunities, recounted a few rules, and then one by one called each teacher to stand while he read off the names of 25 eleven-year-olds who, embarrassed at hearing their names (sometimes mangled) so loud in the huge hall, had to stand shyly and make their way out of the seating rows down to where this stranger stood. when all 25 were assembled, the teacher led them away like a row of ducks & he called the next one of us to stand.

when i led them to my room--this flurry of little people whose names of course i hadn't caught in the long, echoey reading of the list--i had not 55 minutes but approximately 5 hours of new time to fill with introductory activities and getting-to-know-you games. we'd planned things, of course--my "team" teacher in the next room had some 40+ years of experience at this and had generously shared everything she had with me, but i was nervous, they were nervous, i was trying to act both calming to the ones who were terrified & wanted to cry and in charge to the ones who had a whole group of friends in the room & weren't phased at all by my make-believe adult-status. i was 22, and some of them were taller than me.

after we'd managed the 5 hours--which included taking them on bathroom trips because they didn't know where it was, leading them to the cafeteria and eating with them, one of the school's practices that lasted all year, so there were no breaks in the continuity of 11-year-olds throughout the day, and leading them to their PE or arts classes at the end of my time with them (to a part of the building i'd never actually been in either), i had a few hours back in the classroom to straighten up, fill in the bulletin board i'd left blank with the art they'd created that day, put their names on the desks they'd been sitting in, since i hadn't known their names to do it in advance, wring my hands a little, and eat a peanut butter sandwich before all of their parents arrived.

in this particular county, "back to school night" was always held on the first day of school. so i spent several hours that evening meeting and greeting parents whose names weren't yet in any way familiar, whom i only sometimes managed to successfully match to the children i'd seen earlier in the day (who didn't come back to make the matching feasible), showing them around the room & trying for all in the world to act like i had any idea what i was doing. i was 22, & couldn't have projected "just out of college and clueless" any harder if i'd tried, and they pressed worries on me: michelle needs to sit by the door in case there's a bee. you're not allowed to keep epi-pens in the room, but if she gets stung, she'll die. matt's concerned about his weight so don't let the other kids pick on him. sherri wants to wear makeup but she's not allowed so call me if she's borrowed it from a friend. nicole must be allowed to go to the bathroom whenever she wants because she's started her period, and by the way she must succeed because she's going to college. chris isn't in GT because the testers are idiots, but he should be and i expect him to be challenged; did i mention i'm on the school board? because my "team" teacher and i had decided to make the kids' lives less confusing by only introducing them to one room and one teacher the first day, but the parents, reasonably, wanted to meet both teachers their children would be working with, half of these parents were the parents of kids i hadn't even met yet.

i'd just come from a middle-school ed program where, among the many incredibly valuable lessons we learned, we also had to return to those double-lined handwriting books to re-teach ourselves perfect school cursive to model for our students, and we had to learn to do it unslantingly on the blackboard. along with the parents came the special ed advisors, who let me know what changes i had to make in how i conducted a class i'd hardly begun to account for the needs of their students who were mainstreamed into my room; david couldn't read cursive, so i was only to print on the board.

i left the school at 9:30 or 10 that night, knowing i had some serious planning and re-planning to do before i had to be back at 7 in the morning for bus duty, that i had to be back at 7 for meetings or planning or photocopying or bus duty every day but holidays until the following june. it was still august, and the sun still set pretty late, although it was dark by the time i pulled down the drive.

now, i'm facing a room full of adults, for a little over an hour, whom i'll be seeing exactly 28 times between now & christmas, & then most of them will never stop by again. my sixth graders lost salamanders in the aquarium, threw up in the trash can, bled on the floor, slammed doors, screamed in my face, cried, hit each other, mocked me, mocked each other, and in theory learned a lot along the way, although i'd be hard-pressed to prove it. although i loved every one of them (okay, except for the one i'm sure is going to be caught-out as a serial killer somewhere down the line) they wore me out and made me cry at least once a week--at least the weeks i wasn't crying because i'd done something stupid & gotten in trouble with the administration instead.

so this? yeah, it's work, & i put an awful lot in, & i care more than my students want to know & more than the bitter ones ever believe, but after middle school... (did i tell you about the kid, when i was subbing, who kept alternating between being out of my class because he was in juvie and chasing me around the room with scissors when he was back, trying to cut my hair, which i finally allowed rather than calling the office for help because i was trying to keep him out of juvie? or the 12-year-old who, with world-weary eyes, offered me sage advice about how boys who weren't mature enough to handle eye-contact really weren't ready for sex?) ...this stuff is nothing!

I just finished Thomas Kent's Paralogic Rhetoric. I'm getting ready to post a summary of it over in librisnerd (once I summarize it in my Endnote program and then copy and paste that to word -- how weird am I?) but thought I would put in a couple cents over here. I like the way Kent is trying to decenter rhetoric and composition, the way he asserts that it is not as codifiable as Plato and Aristotle would have had us believe, the way he makes room for thoughts that step outside of or beyond strictly logical and rational paradigms. But then, he posits his own counter-theory. Nothing about rhetoric is codifiable or systematic; everything boils down to "hermeneutic guessing" and what Donald Davidson calls "triangulation." What this means is that we are constantly making interpretive guesses as to what we think others think and understand and that this affects how we "do things in the world." Ultimately, we have to communicate in ways that align with how others hermeneutically operate if we want to communicate successfully. So my question is, how is this not systematic? He says that we can never predict what another person will think or say but that we can come close to predicting these things by applying elements of Bakhtin's genre theory and by employing other hermeneutical tactics (of which he never goes into much detail). See, a lot of that sounds somewhat systematic and codifiable to me.

Kent speaks of Davidson's "coherence theory of truth," which is when "sentences can only be evaluated according to the degree to which the claims they make cohere to the beliefs most of us already share about the world" (69). Kent goes on to refer to our need to create "coherence strategies" to aid our hermeneutic guessing. Again, it seems like coherence strategies create systems for which we would go about making our "guesses." Kent cites Rorty throughout his text, and I found it odd that Kent doesn't discuss Rorty's theories of normal and abnornal discourse at all in this text, because the idea of coherence strategies seem to tie in quite a bit with those types of discourse. Kent says that when one wants to posit something "strange," one needs to use stronger coherence strategies, and it was at that point that I thought about how that doesn't really leave any room for abnormal discourse, or maybe it just exemplifies how much more someone who wanted to speak "abnormally" would have to phrase her or his ideas in a "normal" way.

Ultimately, I don't think Kent's theory of paralogic rhetoric really leaves enough room for people who want to speak in ways that oppose forms of "typical" or "normal" communication. In a sense, I think what he is saying does apply to academic writing and to all forms of communication on some level. I mean, it does make sense: when we communicate we end up guessing as to how our audience is going to best receive our message. I don't disagree with that. I just think that that theory doesn't address all of the people who aren't even in the game, who don't get a chance to guess, who wouldn't know the first place to begin guessing, or who have been speaking all this time and haven't been being heard because the don't have the proper "coherence strategy."

Maybe the purpose of his book is to get people to start thinking in this next direction. But for me, in this book, he contradicts himself by presenting his own codifiable, systematic approach, and he doesn't take his ideas far enough in considering their possible ramifications. Finally, I was disappointed in his suggestions for pedagogical applications. Once one sifts through the redundant information, all he really suggests is that the teacher change his or her label to "mentor," and that instead of trying to teach any kind of system for writing, the "mentor" instead just offer advice on how to guess correctly for the corresponding genre of communication. That just wasn't enough for me.

So this is where I stand with this text. I would certainly be interested in hearing anyone else's thoughts on this text.

Here's a little gem at 43 Folders.

Follow the link - it's interesting.

if anybody's got a bailer, that is. at the moment, i'm sort of of the opinion that anyone who tries is more than a little crazy.

(why i don't want to be a phd student anymore)