Write about anything you like.

I'm a day late this week because I've struggled with this prompt.  I've thought about a few things, but nothing in particular, or in any depth.  I've thought about how it is that creative writers have perhaps the least academic training in the department (the MFA is often considered a studio degree) and how we learn to be peers of TCR and literature students, even though in these areas, we are probably far less qualified than students who were denied admission.  I've thought about my fairly rigid view of first year composition and what it is I think students should take from it.  I've thought about beginning with the end in mind (so about what I'd like to happen after the PhD), every semester needing a plan (I highly recommend a presentation I viewed at the beginning of the semester; I think this is it:  http://www.facultydiversity.org/?FallSemesterPlan), and how the growth/fixed mindset model of education currently does and will continue to influence my teaching.  In short, I've thought about a lot.

And then today in my FB newsfeed was a link to a former peer's essay in Tin House (here's the link to "On Pandering:" http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/41314/on-pandering.html).  And holy cow, did this essay strike a nerve.  I've struggled for some time to articulate the difference between masculine and feminine writing, and why masculine work receives a better critical reception.  Meanwhile, even as I wrestle with the differences (are they empirical or perceptional?), I realize that these differences should not matter.  I presented at the Women and Gender's Studies Colloquium here at TTU this semester, and frustratedly conceded that I could not explain the difference, and I'm tackling a similar question in my paper for research methods this fall.  Ironically, this author's astronomical success first raised this question in my mind:  both she and another writer in my program, Donald Ray Pollock, met with serious success after their work was described as masculine.  As if this was the most laudable thing about their work, and both writers are frankly fantastic on their own.  But immediately, I wanted to get to work being masculine in my writing, to add some grittiness in here, and to subtract some lyricism there.  If I were to describe a text as masculine, I daresay you would know exactly what I mean.  If I were to distribute a list of authors to our class and ask students to classify them (say Chuck Pahlaniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt), I also think our decisions would be nearly unanimous.

So today I'm copying and pasting the end of Claire Vaye Watkins's essay here, the part where she offers ideas to marginalized writers.  And now, as the semester ends and as a big round number birthday approaches, this list feels like a sort of freedom.  Not that things have changed, but that they're changing.  (Warning: there's some language here).  (Okay, never mind; I edited it.)

Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon, wherein we each make our own canon filled with what we love to read, what speaks to us and challenges us and opens us up, wherein we can each determine our artistic lineages for ourselves, with curiosity and vigor, rather than trying to shoehorn ourselves into a canon ready made and gifted us by some white [dudes] at Oxford.

Let us use our words and our gazes to make the invisible visible. Let us tell the truth.

Let us, each of us, write things that are uncategorizable, rather than something that panders to and condones and codifies those categories.

Let us burn this... system to the ground and build something better.

What is the thesis to your article for this course? What support will you cite to help you make your case?

So I don't quite have a thesis yet, but I'm working that direction.  I'm looking at some new research in the larger K-12 education field, and wondering about its implications for me in a composition classroom.

First, some background:  Before I moved to Ohio, I was certified with the state of Texas as a 4-8 generalist, and I taught upper elementary special ed.  After I had children, I found myself in Ohio (which did not have a reciprocal agreement with Texas for teaching certificates) and reading quite a bit on best practices in early childhood education.  One of the most striking things I read was from a book titled Nurtureshock, and the short version of the shocking thing is that it's actually not so great an idea to tell children that they're smart, as it decreases their agency and correlates with struggling when something gets too difficult.  It's much better, it turns out, to tell children that they are hard workers.

Approximately two years ago, I took a Stanford MOOC about best practices in math education, and a similar message was heard.  Carol Dweck, a behavioral psychologist from Stanford, wrote a book called Mindset, which details the difference between a fixed educational mindset (wherein one believes that intelligence is innate, that a person is either good or bad at math, for example) and a growth mindset (that the student has power over his or her education based on the amount of work put in, that intelligence can actually be influenced by the actions we take).  Long story short:  it's when a student makes mistakes that the most synaptic pathways are formed in the brain, thus, in effect, growing the brain.  Also, it's incredibly unproductive as a teacher to label students as good or bad at a subject, or to do things that lead students to believe that they're good or bad at a subject.  It's much more helpful to embrace mistakes, and to embrace process.

It's this word process that intrigues me here, as we've talked about process for 13 weeks now, and the composition definition of process is only slightly different.  I also can't help but compare this message with the difference in approach between the composition and the creative writing classroom.  In a creative writing classroom, we assume that we're all beginners to some extent, early on the path, there to learn.  In a composition classroom, we ask students to demonstrate what they've already learned, and there is a much greater emphasis on this performance.  I wonder if there's something here that composition can't take from creative writing, and that sort of goes with this growth and fixed mindset idea.

Anyway, I'm looking at Dweck, at Nurtureshock, at Elbow and Shaughnessy and Hairston, and I hope to get closer to a thesis soon.

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

One of the things I keep thinking about this semester (of course) is the difference between creative writing and composition courses and how, with the change of genre, everything changes: curriculum, presentation, assignments, exercises, even teaching styles.  Both courses teach writing, but audience and purpose changes everything.

I connect this difference to this learning objective from our syllabus:

• Stylistic information presentation. Make stylistic choices appropriate for a given rhetorical situation. Measurement: successfully create and report on applications of core composition concepts through collaboration.

With the change in genre comes this change in rhetorical situation, and this seems to be the key thing for toggling between teaching composition and creative writing.  This semester I've thought about the differences and where there are overlaps, and things I want to preserve no matter the rhetorical situation or genre.

For example, in discussion the other day, I realized that we teach creative writing as if students are beginning writers, because most are new to the genre.  We teach composition as if students are experts.  This difference in teacher perspective means a profound difference in instruction and assessment, and it seems to me that we lose something, some motivation, some autonomy on the part of the student, when we treat students as if they are not learners but performers.  In my composition courses, I'd like to recapture the idea that students are there to learn composition, not to demonstrate to me that they have learned composition prior to the class.  So much research shows that the learning occurs in the mistakes, and yet our current model penalizes mistakes.

This connects to my future job, of course, because it's possible that I may teach either composition or creative writing.  There are differences, but the learning objectives do not diverge profoundly;  to move the student farther along the writing road, to develop the technical skills and thought processes that contribute to good writing.

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that at a teachable moment by design.

In the scaffolded researched paper (which I've adapted from OSU's first year composition program), there are three distinct stages to the assignment:  the primary source analysis, the secondary source integration, and the final researched paper.  All three steps require at least some tricky work, but I'd like to focus on the first part of the assignment, the primary source analysis.

This assignment asks a student to select a text pertaining to the theme of the course.  My favorite theme to teach is Horror, Suspense, and Crime in American Fiction, and I've had students analyze episodes of The Twilight Zone and Lost, short stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper" (who is Jane?!), and novels like Carrie, among countless other texts.  This first assignment asks the student to become really familiar with this primary source, and to write two to three pages taking it apart and analyzing it rhetorically, and then to conclude this exploration with two to three research questions to move the student forward into the next step.

These research questions are tough, but super revealing.  Often, a student's first instinct is to try to answer some question brought up by the text with empirical evidence (eg. is the house in "The Yellow Wallpaper" really an asylum?  or did the Misfit's childhood make him what he is?  or are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw?).  These questions are impossible to answer, of course.  Therefore we spend a great deal of time looking at the kinds of questions suitable for academic work, and these questions can either look deeper into the text, or they can shift the focus to issues outside of the text (What textual evidence exists that the house is an asylum?  To what extent was Henry James interested in the occult?).  Finally, even though we have not yet done the work with secondary sources that will help us find our way to an answer and to a thesis, we have to begin to consider the 'so what?' question (What does James's interest in the occult have to do with anything?  What do we notice that is interesting and new?).

This assignment is one of my favorites because, to me, it shows a burgeoning sophistication with analysis, and a real separation between academic writing and the five paragraph essay.  Students are generally really excited about their primary sources, as well, as the theme is both general and high interest.  I also think it's important to address the difficult of these questions in the classroom, instead of in written assessment, as they are not yet tied to a formal grade.