Confession (I love confessions): lately I’ve been feeling like the composition classroom is a black hole. I’ll never be good enough; they’ll never be good enough; and I can’t even tell you what “good enough” means in the first place. Something about the perfect balance of practical writing preparation for the “next four years” + opportunity to explore personal experience + ability to access and acknowledge other, multicultural, experiences + reading all-stars + transformed writing diehards.
You can see how consuming this black hole of mine is.
Which is why Malea Powell and Wendy Bishop could have come so much sooner for me – and also came at exactly the right time. It’s the end of the semester; if you’re like me, you’re trying not to berate yourself too hard for all of the teaching mistakes (never mind moments) you made this semester, but you can feel the weight of them nonetheless. And you can feel the pressure on you to make next semester better, to really know what you’re doing. Etc. – daily I have a revelation of some lesson or other that I must employ in my classroom next semester, the success of my students in becoming good people entirely hinging on it! So, thank you, Powell and Bishop, for reigning me back in. For suggesting that farther down the line from my (our) graduate school teaching experience, should I (we) follow a path of writing instruction, there will still be questions – an infinite black hole of them – but that rather than consider them an affliction, we should perhaps celebrate that fact. More than that, we’re not alone in our questions, though we’ve probably known this for quite some time now; Powell hasn’t been the first to suggest the intersections of community and writing instruction (or just teaching, period), but in the thick of brain-deadening, final exam stress – when I (for one, but surely not the only one) am tense with the needs of my students versus the demands of my personal academics – it certainly helps to be reminded of that.
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My favorite moment in these articles came with Bishop’s series of questions on page 70 or, rather, with the sentiment introducing those questions: “I find it useful to list the particular and local questions I have as a teacher because I have been thinking globally until my head hurts and my teaching suffers….For me, teaching questions are generative, each a meditative koan. For none of them do I have final answers, measurable outcomes.” (And here, I felt that she wanted to add And that’s okay! or And that’s not the point!) Bishop qualifies her questions as issues she is currently “crucially interested in” (70) rather than questions that, say, keep her up at night, and I really like this welcoming attitude, this appreciation for these questions that mark and drive her learning. Is it too early for a New Year’s resolution? Okay, how about an end-of-semester one then: I will also (try to) start thinking of my black hole of questions in the same positive light as Bishop (starting by dropping the black hole motif); I will start thinking of my most pressing questions as viable records of my developing awareness as an instructor.
Okay, I do often wonder if there is any way, any way at all (even via a Faustian option) that I can turn all my students onto the idea of leading lives of utter devotion to writing. But in moments of great and rare clarity, I also find myself pondering more serious, doable questions like how, next semester, I will empower my students to write from experience while broadening their ideas of experience to include the marginal, the oppressed and the multicultural. Or how reading really will have a vital role in the improvement of my students’ writing, and rhetorical grammar will be something we tackle every single day. Or how I will bring discussions of social justice into the classroom, or take writing out of the classroom, or run a class blog that really does have a fundamental role in their development as citizen-writers, rather than be the transparent busy work it’s been this semester. And so on – but you see that those are some my crucial interests, some of my most pressing questions coming out of what I have learned this semester. I invite you to leave yours.
Noel,
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate your "black hole" motif (even though you're vowing to drop it) and can empathize with your feeling of being overwhelmed by all of the things we should/could/might do in the classroom to enhance our teaching. Like you, questions plague me about what I could be doing differently. Unlike you, I found the list of questions formulated by Bishop more unsettling than comforting. Sure, she prefaces the list by saying, "For none of them do I have final answers, measurable outcomes” (70), but for some reason I was expecting a list of digestible questions, ones that were at least capable of being answered. Instead, she touches on topics across the board that left me feeling even more overwhelmed!
The message here, of course, is that we should accept the fact that we don’t have all the answers and that we should continue asking questions regardless of our inability to answer them. The question that was most meaningful to me and that I’ve been considering as I begin work on my portfolio was number 4: “Why are my first days in the writing classroom so different from last days of each term? What transpires and needs to transpire? How can and do I better understand the journey we take together for a term?” (70) Talk about overwhelming. But infinitely important, this question that asks us to (attempt to) name the practices that have shaped our classroom from awkward Day 1 to what it is today. As we reflect on the past semester, we should be asking ourselves how we can correct mistakes, acknowledge and repeat positive practices, and generally improve our teaching for next semester (although the questioning next semester will undoubtedly continue…)
Noel and Nancy,
ReplyDeleteI chime in by turning on the emphatic Wisconsin accent I learned from my aunts: Oh, I hear ya!
Questions, questions, questions. Like Noel, I found Bishop’s list of questions to be a comfort. I realized I’m not alone in all my questions, and I never will be. More teaching leads to more questions. The questions will change as we change, as our students change—but the questions will always remain.
I agree with you, Nancy, and Carl in his post, about the powerful resonance of question #4. What is the difference between the semester’s first teaching days and these last teaching days? As Noel says, we have berated ourselves for a semester: we have walked out of 540 cataloging the list of errors we realize we’ve made, making mental notes about the ways we can avoid those errors in the future, crafting to-do and must-do lists for the upcoming unit and the upcoming semester.
But, even while we’ve done all that, we’ve taken our students from awkward day 1 to today. And, from what we have written on this week’s blog so far, and from what people tend to reveal in 540—today isn’t so bad. Even after a semester of messing up. Even after realizing we should have done this differently and we should have never even attempted that. Even as we have stumbled and tried, and laughed at ourselves and learned, we’ve gotten this far. We’re still reflective—that’s key, that’s key, that’s key—and we still acknowledge all the ways we hope to and must grow as teachers, but, we have a lot to pleased about, too.
Bishop writes about the “confusing benefits of hard work: weariness and satisfaction” (69). It’s easy, especially at this time in the semester, to feel that weariness. But we need to permit ourselves the satisfaction, too. Who’d a thunk on day one of bootcamp that we’d make it this far, and learn what we’ve learned? We’ll keep trying, we’ll keep reflecting, and we’ll keep improving—but I also believe we need to balance those practices with satisfaction in all that has gone “terribly right,” as Bishop puts it (77), this semester.
Noel (and others), I sense that many of us feel similarly. In our eyes, mistakes and missed opportunities loom large, and successes seem too few to count.
ReplyDeleteI entered this class believing, as Bishop says, “Teaching composition is (still) mostly about teaching composition.” (65). But “teaching composition” has involved so much more than I imagined, and at times I’ve felt the information drowning me. Integrating all of this knowledge has been a confusing and less-than-successful process. But Bishop’s essay encourages us to list what is most important: “It seems critically important to rediscover what is fundamentally sound about what we do when we support our writing students…” (69). She says that we should find ways to praise what we do well, as individuals and as a profession (71). That can be hard to do when feeling overwhelmed.
But perhaps this overwhelmed feeling is necessary and helpful. As the semester has progressed, the honesty and openness in our blog comments has increased. We are placing less emphasis on giving the right answers and more on asking honest questions.
It seems to me that the first step to becoming competent is admitting how little you know. When this mindset takes hold, the real learning can begin.
You know, I think this plethora (or black hole) of questions is a really good thing. While it is uncomfortable and frustrating to question our teaching practices, it is an indicator that we are thinking and reflecting (which Lauren writes is "key" x3). We would be in trouble if we thought we knew everything, closed our minds and cruised by on our meager skills (I am thinking of some high school teachers here and others who have been in the profession for too long). The best teachers are learners themselves, and as Bishop writes, "learning begins with questioning" (70).
ReplyDeleteAlso, this doesn't come up in any post, but I wanted to point out a section of Powell's article in relation to Noel's mention of citizen-writers and social justice in the classroom. She writes that "The buildings that you teach and live and learn in are sunk into a place, a landscape and a history. Honor that history and the people whose lives created it. The students that you teach are people who come from communities that have a history, that have a place. Honor those histories." I believe that the life-place essay does a good job of addressing this question of place. We are also honoring our students' histories and knowledge by encouraging them to write about it in their PAA.
ReplyDeleteYet I believe that Powell is pushing us past these assignments. She seems to be talking about the larger history of our country and the injustices upon which it is built. She continues on to write that we must honor the history of our landscape "..Even when they intersect in ways that are painful and uncomfortable. Especially then, because learning happens there in those intersections laden with discomfort" (Powell 579). I hope to take up Powell's challenge and work to incorporate a more truthful and insightful consideration of landscape and history in my class next semester.
Laurel, I am so glad you brought up those Powell quotes, as they rang quite true and significant to me in this discussion of how Bishops sees reinvented, engaging composition instruction and the black hole concept we can all relate to in some way. Powell goes on to include the lives of teachers and administrators, in addition to students, as well as the fact that the classrooms that we work in have been "built and maintained by laboring bodies" (579). Beyond the opportunities and pitfalls that Bishop sees in the classroom, I find it useful, for just a moment, to step even beyond our student's "underlives" and backgrounds to reposition ourselves in the larger university context we find ourselves in. Not for too long, however, as we take that into consideration in our classroom community and get back to the task at hand: writing.
ReplyDeleteIf and when we see our classrooms as black holes and a space to be filled with all of our new teacherly shoulda-coulda-wouldas, I think it is important to remember that we all have strengths and weaknesses. We will be exploring this throughout our time as teachers, so of course we'll be running in to quite a few walls...this is just the beginning. This is how we learn how we, as individual teachers, may best engage a classroom of students. Bishop believes "we can be taking more critical and creative approaches to the teaching day. Some of us contribute through analysis and critique; an equal number of us can contribute deeply to the profession through action or reflection" (74). Some people teach through poems, others through journals (and of course, this is a very limited list, but pulling from Bishop's essay). The point is, yes, there is much room for improvement, and that may seem like a black hole, but it means there is room for great, positive changes in the composition lives of our students as well.
Noel,
ReplyDeleteI can completely relate to your opening confession (and I suspect other TAs have experienced the same “black hole” effect, too). As I’ve been revising my lesson plans for the portfolio and drafting my teaching statement, an overwhelming combination of often contradictory emotions has consumed me—excitement at the curricular changes I hope to next semester, despair at the fact that I hadn’t thought of said changes sooner, dread that these updated methods I’m eager to implement won’t work out. When I received the folder of course evaluations in my mailbox and read over the questions on the written departmental form, I had a sudden, horrifying vision that all of my students would report that no course exercises had helped them— all activities were useless, and that I was useless as well. As Joel points out in his post, when things are going well “I feel like a million bucks”—I’ve even literally called home to my mother to gush about the particularly engaging days—but when it comes to this time in the semester, when I’m thinking critically about my pedagogy and my students come to class deadened and disheartened with the end-of-semester stress, it’s so easy to lose sight of those lovely moments when, as Bishop says, things have gone “terribly right” (77).
I think you and Bishop have it right when you say that we can’t let our questions or doubts consume us, and we shouldn’t feel they are marks of our ineptitude. As Lauren points out, we should be reflecting, reflecting, reflecting—because questioning, reflecting, and desiring change all reveal that we actually care about teaching enough to eschew what’s familiar for what our classroom communities need.
I say, let’s keep the questions coming “regardless of our inability to answer them,” to quote Nancy. Let’s work to tackle those that are “doable,” answering them by changing our curriculum and our attitudes, by reading scholarship by other composition teachers and synthesizing our knowledge and experience with theirs. Let’s listen to the feedback our students and our guts give us, even if the prospect of revising lesson plans—ones we already spent hours carefully crafting—feels daunting. We must be willing to constantly reflect and revise—to listen and “reorient ourselves,” as Powell urges us (580). Our reflection and reorientation might lead us to reevaluate what type of pedagogy we privilege—communal or individual, collective or institutional (Powell 572-3). Reflection might lead to more “black hole” questions, most of which for me involve practical applications—once we know why, how do we know how? How can I help my students see that “discussions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, orientation, ableness, etc...[are] already part of the community’s understandings of itself”? (Powell 573-4). How can I frame these discussions organically, so that my students see them in relation to writing, to themselves? These are my crucial questions, the aspects of pedagogy that I still need to explore and better understand. I used to be afraid of having these questions, but now I realize that it’s a lack of inquiry—a lack of critical pedagogical curiosity and engagement—that I should really fear.