The reading responses (RR) is where it all goes down.... where it all falls down. This is where you will spend the bulk of your time and energy this semester. There is a rubric/point spread (see below) since each RR is worth two points. Your focus though is on making these RRs sing and do and mean what you want. This is where you truly PUT SOME STANK ON IT!
Carmen's Ph.D. advisor, John Mayher, always displayed this cartoon on his office door. It seemed too good not to share it here!
Here's a story that might drive things home a bit more. In spring 2015, I asked my college students a question I wanted to hear their thoughts on at the end of the semester: what was the best piece of writing that you did this schoolyear (in any class) and why do you call that your best? The students' answers astounded me, particularly the way in which those students most interested in social justice (and I mean social justice as a process and life commitment, not a graded school assignment) answered so fundamentally differently.
The students who I would most call activist and conscious talked about what they learned about the world and themselves; how they had committed to social justice issues more than ever before; why they saw themselves as people who had creative and/or political agency to change the world, help their families, and/or write in a way that reached and impacted people. Some of them even wrote this final reflective essay as a letter to their mothers explaining their gratitude and respect or as a letter to a younger version of themselves explaining all that they would soon become if they could just survive that current, ugly moment. It would have brought tears to your eyes.
But then there were those others students in the "special and smart" cohort... I was bored. A large number of them talked about assignments where the teacher changed every word, gave them a new research topic when the teacher did not like the topic they had selected, told them what arguments to make, corrected every single mistake, drew arrows all over their papers showing them where each new paragraph and idea should go. For these students, successful writing was when you got your paper back from the teacher and there were no marks on it. No one talked about any ideas, content, or dispositions they had learned or developed. No one even talked about writing as a process other than collecting teachers' corrections and finally receiving an A after correcting all the flaws (always called "correcting," NOT revising). The crazy thing is that I have heard other professors call that kind of teaching: providing students with DETAILED FEEDBACK. That's not feedback. When someone takes over and owns YOUR ideas, that does not help you. When I told my own family about this--- family members who have never gone to college and some, not even to high school--- they were perplexed: why is it that when high school teachers give students the answers to state tests, they are arrested while college professors can tell students exactly what to say and how to say it and no one even thinks that's a form of teacher-cheating? It was a good question. I tell you these stories because if you are expecting a teacher to "correct" your writing, you are in the wrong class! I comment to big ideas, not microscopic language units. There will come a time when we write public/digital, edited texts where we will look at the form and the surface issues, but that won't be the entire driving force of writing in this class.
There are two kinds of teacher approaches to writing that happen most often in college classrooms: 1) the tricky examiner: when a teacher gives you an essay to write but it's really more like a quiz or an exam because the teacher just goes through it to see if you have a thesis statement and if you got the facts and information correct (a multiple choice exam would be more suitable for this exam-approach but this teacher likes to be able to say he assigns essays); 2) the hunter in the woods: when a teacher, like the one in my above example, goes hunting through your writing, guns blazing, looking for any stir or rattle that he thinks should not be there and then SHOOTS it down. Neither of these is the approach to writing in this class so make sure you understand this fact UP FRONT! Make sure that this is the classroom you want to be in.
The students who I would most call activist and conscious talked about what they learned about the world and themselves; how they had committed to social justice issues more than ever before; why they saw themselves as people who had creative and/or political agency to change the world, help their families, and/or write in a way that reached and impacted people. Some of them even wrote this final reflective essay as a letter to their mothers explaining their gratitude and respect or as a letter to a younger version of themselves explaining all that they would soon become if they could just survive that current, ugly moment. It would have brought tears to your eyes.
But then there were those others students in the "special and smart" cohort... I was bored. A large number of them talked about assignments where the teacher changed every word, gave them a new research topic when the teacher did not like the topic they had selected, told them what arguments to make, corrected every single mistake, drew arrows all over their papers showing them where each new paragraph and idea should go. For these students, successful writing was when you got your paper back from the teacher and there were no marks on it. No one talked about any ideas, content, or dispositions they had learned or developed. No one even talked about writing as a process other than collecting teachers' corrections and finally receiving an A after correcting all the flaws (always called "correcting," NOT revising). The crazy thing is that I have heard other professors call that kind of teaching: providing students with DETAILED FEEDBACK. That's not feedback. When someone takes over and owns YOUR ideas, that does not help you. When I told my own family about this--- family members who have never gone to college and some, not even to high school--- they were perplexed: why is it that when high school teachers give students the answers to state tests, they are arrested while college professors can tell students exactly what to say and how to say it and no one even thinks that's a form of teacher-cheating? It was a good question. I tell you these stories because if you are expecting a teacher to "correct" your writing, you are in the wrong class! I comment to big ideas, not microscopic language units. There will come a time when we write public/digital, edited texts where we will look at the form and the surface issues, but that won't be the entire driving force of writing in this class.
There are two kinds of teacher approaches to writing that happen most often in college classrooms: 1) the tricky examiner: when a teacher gives you an essay to write but it's really more like a quiz or an exam because the teacher just goes through it to see if you have a thesis statement and if you got the facts and information correct (a multiple choice exam would be more suitable for this exam-approach but this teacher likes to be able to say he assigns essays); 2) the hunter in the woods: when a teacher, like the one in my above example, goes hunting through your writing, guns blazing, looking for any stir or rattle that he thinks should not be there and then SHOOTS it down. Neither of these is the approach to writing in this class so make sure you understand this fact UP FRONT! Make sure that this is the classroom you want to be in.
