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. 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!
I once asked my college students in New York City a question: 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 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 their 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 brought tears to my 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 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 to warn you that I am not a teacher who "corrects" your writing! 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.
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 their 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 brought tears to my 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 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 to warn you that I am not a teacher who "corrects" your writing! 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.
In my youth, when someone told you that you had SKILLZ, that was a serious compliment. It meant that you had mastered some serious techniques (in rhyming, drawing, singing, piano playing, writing, etc). Not only had you mastered those techniques, you did something fantastic with those techniques: you took them to a whole other level. The word, skillz, thus, is NOT the same thing as the word, skills--- a word that circulates widely in schooling's lesson plans (skillz is NOT a misspelling as many Old Skool pundits might exclaim). Showing your skills in school usually means that you have mastered the basics, the how-to's, and the correct application of a standard set of rules that a teacher gives (as opposed to a larger audience that you are interacting with). Skillz, however, is not a standard defined by institutions. It is not about acquiring the basics; it's about exceeding the basics to move a crowd your way. Yes, there will be skills that we talk about in this class, but your ultimate job is to acquire SKILLZ .... and not skills! Know the difference!
