Slogging

It was a pretty uneventful day. Meeting (blech), class, break, class. The break was actually pretty fun: James came by to talk over his paper ideas for 229 and 101, and we went over the 229 paper he was getting back; he truly wants to learn all the fine points, so it's a pleasure to go over them with him and to see him pick up on them. And his paper ideas for the two classes are great; I'm actually looking forward to reading them. Imagine that.

The classes were spent in part going over basic sentence-level stuff (particularly the specific rules for comma use), then the students worked in their groups. I'm wondering why, when I reworked the assignment schedule, I decided to require the reading they're doing for next week--and put a much more interesting (if difficult) reading in the "extra credit" category. I must have had a reason, but damned if I can remember now what the hell it was. In any event, they are mostly concerned about their presentations, and rightly, so I don't feel like I'm giving them short shrift to back off and just let them do their thing--and if we finish up with a simpler and less thought-provoking essay.

About the extra credit idea, which I was test-driving this semester, I don't think I'll do it again. If I do, I'll have to specify that the total can only raise the final grade by X amount: one student has been consistently turning in extra credit, but her papers suck, and I don't want her to get a grade she genuinely doesn't deserve for a writing class. I don't much like the idea of extra credit anyway: I just did it because there are so many essays I want them to read and we have time for so few, I hoped it would be a way to get them to read a few more. But most of them aren't doing it, or if they are, they're not understanding what they read, so it's pretty much wasted effort on everyone's part.

I was talking with colleague/friend Duane today about the struggle to get students to understand how critical material works, that it leads us to our own ideas: he used the word "distill," which I like very much to describe the process. We read something, and from it we distill an idea, which we then connect to a point in our analysis (untying) of the primary material. When he shows them how it works, using his own ideas, they can see it, but they still can't do it, and I realized (duh!) that they can't distill because they're still struggling so hard just to understand. We're talking how to synthesize, but that requires incorporation first, and that's where they fall down.

Talking to him, though, I further developed my cooking analogy. Students were worried that if they all had the same sources in their groups, they'd all end up writing the same paper. I explained that if I gave each of them the same ingredients--eggs, flour, milk, sugar, whatever--and told them to go off and make something from them without specifying what they should make, they'd all come up with something different. So, here's the new analogy: the readings are the ingredients, critical material is one of the tools used to assemble them, and the paper is the recipe you create. I can (and no doubt will) elaborate on that, but I think it sort of works. It probably won't make a damned bit of difference to their papers, but it may help them understand conceptually what they're supposed to be doing.

I just had an idea: at one of the seminars I went to a while back, a philosophy professor from Stony Brook gave a whole bunch of demonstrations about how to make ideas more concrete and visual, and his advice was, whenever possible, to turn something into a visual (not words, but an image). We are, after all, a visual species. So, what if I were to bring in a grocery bag filled with ingredients, as in the analogy above. The bag filled with stuff is the primary material. You need to take all the ingredients out of the bag and figure out how they work together and in what amounts. That's analysis. The cooking tools are your critical sources and your own intellect. You need to explain how to put them all together in some detail: that's the recipe/paper. Hmmmmm. Let me think about that. Might be worth a test-drive in my 102 classes next semester.

And speaking of which, I really do need to order my books and get the readers printed up. I haven't checked to see if anyone is signing up for Nature in Lit: I should do that to see if I need to plaster flyers all over creation.

And now I need to shut up and go to bed.