So here we are, two days into the new teaching year.
I have a wonderful class schedule. This semester, I have Writer’s Craft and TWO sections of Grade 10 Applied. I have wanted to have a greater chunk of the applied kids for a while. And it will balance out the marking load of writer’s craft.
So far, the WC class has 16 students in it- absolutely ideal. Half of them are students I taught in Grade 11 last year, and these known quantities are warm, and funny, and funky and learned to play with language last year. The remaining half are feeling shy and tentative, but are sweet, and seem happy to try these strange new things. I have a lot of hope for this class. I think we could go far.
The 2p’s are bumpy, as always, but I don’t have anyone who seems particularly oppositional. Thug Quotient = 0. Should be an easier ride than I’ve had in the past.
And this despite a new challenge for me. I was told on the day before classes started that I would have a student with asperger’s syndrome. He’s being gradually introduced into a mainstream setting. Last semester at my school was his first successful term in a mainstream setting. I took a deep breath when I was told, but knew that I could rally to the cause. There are other external factors that make working with this student a particular challenge, but I won’t go into those details here. I do feel sufficiently equipped to deal with those issues, especially since I have learned so much in these past two years about setting appropriate personal boundaries, and how to protect myself from all kinds of crazy.
I had 3 conversations about this student before I started teaching him. Again, this is the day before classes began. The first conversation was with a teacher who had taught him last year. He gave me the most useful information. He was reassuring, encouraging. He told me that the student in question loved the clicker technology that this teacher and I had both been piloting last semester, so that was exciting. He also told me that I would have to sign a lot of forms in regards to this student. (I have yet to be presented with any kind of form) He told me that this student can get violent as a response to his feelings of anxiety. He has thrown things at teachers before. This teacher was surprised that I had not been appraised of the situation earlier. He also told me that he sits by the door and has his own hall pass, and that he knows that if he gets overly anxious, he can manage it by leaving class and taking a walk. This was completely reassuring. I wish I had that kind of pass. He also has two Educational Assistants assigned especially to him. At this, my eyes brightened. This might work!
The second conversation was with the administrator who is the liason between student, parent, and all those concerned for this student. She showed me his “OSR” file- that’s the Ontario Student Record- you know that file that people use to threaten you with. Seriously folks, after high school, it’s gone. Shredsville.
But I have never seen an OSR this thick. Most are about an inch thick upon graduation from high school. This kid’s was a good 4 inches thick with 1 year of high school equivalency under his belt. Again, I breathed, in and out. This administrator also told me that this student has particular trigger words that set him off. The first trigger was a phrase that I use often. In fact, it’s one I often use deliberately as a pedagogical strategy. Again, for anonymity’s sake, I’m not going to say the phrase here. But most of this student’s triggers relate to anxiety, and the feeling of lack of control. He believes that teachers should provide certainty, and if they express uncertainty, it causes him great anxiety. When I realized that this was at the root of this student’s anxiety, I understood immediately. On some levels, he’s no different from any student I’ve ever had. She also said that any instruction I gave, I should repeat and mention his name specifically. He has difficulty generalizing the abstract instruction to be referring to him specifically.
I spent some time in the office, reviewing this OSR. I was particularly interested in learning anything I could about what kinds of teaching strategies would be useful to help him. Or if there were any other triggers I should try to avoid. One of the things I learned was that he really loves maps. So do I. And I immediately thought about the Altas of Experience. I wondered if that might be a comfortable way for him to engage idoms associated with emotion. I have a bunch of large, great quality reproductions of pages from this books, so I tacked one up by his desk. But I worried about the other map I have on my wall. What kind of effect would that kind of conceptual disruption have on this student?
As I was reviewing the OSR, another adminstrator crossed my path. “Oh, don’t look at the OSR!” she said. I blinked at her. “It will be fine!” This admin is new to our school and really doesn’t know me from Adam, as far as I know. “You should have seen my OSR!” she nudged. “It was just as thick! For behavioural issues!” I think – I think- I understood where she was coming from. I assume she meant- “don’t be prejudiced against a kid just because he’s got a thick OSR.” I let it go- cause she doesn’t know me. All the same. I wished she had instead asked me how I was feeling about the situation, and if there was anything she could do to support me.
Finally, the first day came.
at the same time, as I bash my head up against Freirean pedagogy again, I think about my 2ps. I think about how disconnected they are from school, how disempowered they feel within its walls.
and I wonder how I can shift this.
The major problem, as I see it, is that this group of students, tends to get really nervous when things aren’t highly structured. So, asking their involvement in the structuring of the work gets them in the wildest tizzy.
They’re also 15 years old, and male dominated.
So, I’m wondering if I can find a way to just make a portion of their experience self-directed and negotiated. Some kind of independent project.
I’m thinking about presenting to them a whole list of the things that I think being skilled in “English” can give them. Of course, I’ll invite them to add to the list.
And then, I would ask them to choose a skill that they want to get better at for themselves.
And then, we would together devise a way for them to get better at it.
And we could find a way to measure their success on an individual level.
I haven’t had much success with blogging with these students, and as I was talking about that with somebody recently, I finally understood why. It’s wayyy too public for them. They are merciless with each other when they screw up, and they know that this community is not safe.
But they all participate in the e-mail assignment. I get it now. It’s safer. So maybe I could do this independent project by e-mail?
I dunno. I have two sections of these kids this year. That might be unwieldy.
hrmm…
but it would be very cool.
August 19th,2009
applied | tags:
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I am finally cracking the spine of Ira Shor’s When Students Have Power. I am coming to it from a very different place than I would have three years ago. I no longer see the power imbalance between me and my students as a problem. And I think this is mostly because I am in a high school, and my students are not adults. Their ideas about power and authority are problematic, to say the least. So I’m happy to model for them a benevolent semi-dictatorship, where I do set the expectations and goals and procedures, but they are reasonable, and attainable, and I am flexible and human in their implementation.
But I was curious to see what he had to say about grading.
He talks about the difficulties of implementing a standard criteriea of quality in assessing the work of students who come from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds, from non-standard situations:
“Can teachers in an unequal society pretend that there is a universal student for whom single standards are fair? Should students continue to be graded on academic performances dissociated from social factors like race and class, as if we live in a fair meritocracy? Is it equitable to treat all people the same when they have inequitable relations to power and resources in school and society” (85).
This approach to evaluation is problematic on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin.
First, academic performance is never dissociated from social factors like race and class, as Shor points out. The tasks themselves tend to reflect social bias of all kinds. So, one way, and I would argue one of the most important ways of addressing these socio-political inequities, is to redesign the tasks. For example, assign a collaborative essay in addition to a kill and destroy debate.
Second, we are not evaluating the students. We are evaluating the quality of their work. I find it highly patronizing to even suggest that we should apply a different standard of quality because students might be coming from circumstances that give them less access to privilege. And I think they would too.
Nonetheless, I do acknowledge, of course I do, that there is no level playing field, and for this reason, if I know that a 16 year old student of mine is living on her own, I am going to grant her more concessions, and offer her more support than a student who has parental support and economic security.
I also trust my students. I trust that if they recognize the value in what we’re doing, they will find a way to excel. Because they do find a way to excel at the things that they need to, have to, and desperately want to do.
I was reading Rosmarie Waldrop’s wonderful talk in The Politics of Poetic Form, and she spends a bit of time talking about Steve McCaffery’s ideas about writing as a general economy, which prompted me to consider how this idea might be useful when talking about evaluating poetry.
It’s this, isn’t it, is this notion of the excess, the surfeit, which troubles us when we think about quanitifying a poem’s worth. Does the fact that a poem’s meaning excedes our grasp (or should) mean that a poem’s quality should be likewise beyond measure?
What would evaluation as potlatch look like? If I burned my students’ poems…
Then there’s the slam. And all the idol shows. We’re currently saturated with the practice of evaluating creative expression/performance with a quantifiable number. And this might be a useful example to use as a way introducing the concept of evaluating according to specific criteria/stanards of taste. So, for example, we can talk about the fact that although William Hung’s performance failed to satisfy the standards of worth for American Idol, it clearly had another kind of value (as problemmatic as that might be). Or, more subtle examples, like the rock & country singers whose performances are acknowledged as good but not “idol material.”
Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, by Peter J. Rabinowitz, is one of the books that has been the most useful to me as I struggled to understand the causes of the wildly divergent interpretations my students constructed from their readings. In it, he describes different narrative conventions and how authors and readers rely on these conventions to create meaning in stories. The first chapter, for exmaple, talks about “rules of notice,” and how placing certain narrative details in certain privileged positions in a story will grant them more readerly attention- the beginning and end of a section, for example. Or how rupture creates notice.
But it’s the final chapter that is knocking my socks off right now. He talks about misreadings- specifically readings where the reader is trying to read in accordance with what they imagine is authorial intention, and going wayyy off:
“Sometimes particular misreadings are widespread rather than idiosyncratic- and I would argue that such persistent misreading usually has its origins, not in the readers as individuals, but in the culture that has taught them to read. We can therefore often uncover forecs at work in a society by reading its misreadings, byt studying the ways that readers have misappropriated the texts they live with.” (193)
He uses critical and popular responses to The Big Sleep as an example, arguing that the persistent reading of Carmen as the main villain of the story reveals the mysogony of this community of readers. I have seen this countless times in my classes- students blaming Ophelia for Hamlet’s downfall, or launching tirades against Mangan’s sister in Araby.
And as I examine how gender is represented and read in interactive fiction, working on my paper for DAC 2009, I find again how fruitful it is to examine misreadings. I’ve most recently been looking at Galatea, Emily Short’s elegant exploration of the Pygmalion story, with a Turing twist. Short herself says that when she was writing about it, she was thinking about art and feminism. I have yet to find a review or commentary that actually engages with any of these aspects of the work. Which is surprising. Surely, there’s a comparative essay to be done between Galatea and Patchwork Girl?
But it’s this particular misreading that’s got me a bit stymied.
In a fairly recent issue of SPAG, Jimmy Maher writes:
Let’s consider one of the played, respected, and oft-written about works of modern IF: Emily Short’s Galatea. In all of the reviews and and other discussions of the game you can find on the Internet and in printed academic literature, you will be hard pressed to find much commentary on the content of the piece.
Now, he’s not particularly wrong here. As I mentioned above, I have not beeb able to find any kind of commentary on the idea of art, the relationship between creator and created, the idealization of women, emergent subjectivity, etc etc.
But he then goes on to say:
Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved. However, it seems to excite very little love. Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.
well now… what are we to make of these?
Galatea is the first work since So Far and Photopia to take me prisoner, to capture my heart. So Far did it with its marvelous worlds and sheer mystery, Photopia did it when the pieces finally tumbled together, and Galatea does it, well, with Galatea…
So, what do I make of Galatea? What stories have I decided to form? Good question. I don’t know. There are endings such as the ones with Dionysus that leave me fearful, but wanting to follow. There are endings that are happy, endings that are not. I have brought her into mortality, or followed her to immortality. I remain cautious. I — again, the absurd, perhaps justifiable response — want to help her be.
I can’t. She’s a quarter-megabyte bit of code in my computer. The only existence she has is inside my mind and the minds of everyone else who plays the game. I can’t affect what they do with her; She’s not real dammit! I overreact. I anthropomorphize. A good sense of fantasy is healthy, but when you can’t tell the difference anymore, that’s insanity. Madness.
and then there’s this:
I’m writing this with a tear in my eye.
I don’t cry at games, really. I’ve been close a couple of times before – Dear Esther’s conclusion was particularly heartbreaking, and Braid’s general solemness made it somewhat emotionally draining – but I’ve just played through Galatea for probably the twentieth time, and it’s still so marvellous, so perfect and so tragic that I find it impossible to remain unmoved.
It’s when I come across a bizarre blindspot like this that I start getting interested. The fact is that even though these last two reviewers do engage with the content of the piece, to form an emotional attachment with the characters, they still don’t address what I would argue are the main themes of the piece. The second one is particularly telling- faced with Galatea’s plight, he cries for himself.
what to make of it?
that’s for tomorrow.
I really don’t know why it has taken me this long.
But looking back over my reading history, it seems absured to me that no one ever sat me down and said really, no, really, you must read this.
And I’ve said this before about many a text.
And perhaps it’s just as well that I come to it now, because in my early intellectual life, I was quite sure we were well beyond that now. I thought we had rooms and houses and boardrooms if we should take the notion.
And now that I know that much of that is a mug’s game, I come to this astonishing text, with its digressive narrative frame that after a few anxious moments you learn to trust.
And these sentences! Oh! The thrill and rush of these sentences! And she talks about sentences. About Austen’s sentences. I thought I was sensitive to sentences, but I realize now there is more to them than ever I knew.
And at the same time that I’m reading this, I go to the AGO’s Surreal Things exhibit, and I learn about a whole host of women surrealists whose names were never known to me before- especially Leonor Fini, whose work delights me.
(but as I wander through the AGO’s Coach House installation- who knew??? no, really… did anyone say???- I am looking everywhere for Barbara Caruso. Why isn’t she here? Surely…)
And not even a day later, the wonderful Penn Sound page points me to Helen Adam, a progeniteur (progeniteuse?) of the Beat Scene, and I sorta want to put her in a room with Joan Baez cause surely they were revisiting the ballad at the same time?
Still, her collages remind me very much of what I saw of Lenori Fini- this mythological collage of feminine desire.
All of these women.
so.
I have decided to focus my major research paper (MRP) for my M.Ed on the subject of evaluating poetry – or “grading” as the amercians call it. I’m a bit reluctant about it cause it certainly ain’t no fun, and it’s much less fun than writing about digital matters, and I’m even having difficulty figuring out if I can wangle a digital trajectory in there somewhere. Nevertheless, there are two things to recommend it:
1) it’s containable.
2) it is utterly, utterly useful and, I’d venture to say, much needed
So much of the good writing & practice on poetry and pedagogy comes from poets who visit classrooms, and who never have to deal with the final reckoning. And Juliana Spahr and Joan Retallack’s fabulous Poetry & Pedagogy really lives in a post-secondary culture, where students have actually, really and truly elected to take courses in literature- or even poetry.
It’s a very different context from mine.
And I do think that what stops most people short of teaching the reading and writing of poetry is the fear of having to evaluate it.
Most of the good stuff I’ve read so far on the matter have come to the same conclusion I did- people get all weird about marking (canuck grading) poetry because they either value it too much or too little. If they value it too much, they feel that to place a quantifiable value on a poem is akin to pricing the value of a soul. If they value it too little, there’s not much point in evaluating it at all- it’s one of those fluffly bunny touchy feely loosey goosey activities, so give it a mark based on presentation and be done with it.
And the curriculum is not to blame for this. Poetry gets equal, indiscriminate footing along with every other genre in the Ontario curriculum documents, which, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, are suprisingly progressive. While, on the one hand, they clearly owe a heavy debt to New Criticism, and a slathering of new fangled reader- response, increasingly, they are encouraging teachers to ask questions about what possible impact race, gender, class, nationality, orientation, etc, migt have on the production or reception of the text. Booya!
So now that we’re at the, “what now” phase… what have we got…?
W. David LeNoir (now that’s an academic nom de plume and a half. He’s got the requisite initial initial, bien sur, and then the dark “le noir”, which gives it a kind of renaissance courtier cum pirate vagabong flavour…) contribited an excellent, must-read article to the English Journal on the subject, where he outlines the problem, eloquently and insightfully:
The idea of not being comfortable evaluat-
ing student poetry is understandable, but avoiding
something worthwhile purely because it is uncom-
fortable is a poor excuse—especially for teachers,
who frequently ask students to do “uncomfortable”
things. Few of us would accept as a legitimate ex-
cuse something like, “Gee, Teach, I think I’ll pass
on that essay you assigned—I’m not really comfort-
able with that expository prose business.” The only
way to overcome this discomfort is to make our-
selves comfortable—by doing.
What we seek in evaluative strategies is
some elusive middle ground between flexibility and
consistency; we want our strategies to accommo-
date a variety of eventualities but still retain their in-
tegrity relative to the curriculum and goals of our
profession. Poetry evaluation is subjective, but so is
evaluation of all writing to some extent. We have to
find the objective things that we esteem, establish
criteria, establish a system for employing the crite-
ria, and develop self-confidence and familiarity
through practice.
Ja, wohl, bien sur, etc etc.
So, how do we proceeed?
LeNoir jumps straight to developing rubrics with the kids. While involving student participation in the development of rubrics is admirable and ideal, unless you first broaden and develop their understanding of what a poem can be, the rubrics are going to be somewhat constricting. For example, LeNoir’s students come up with these attributes:
creativity/originality, imagery, readability/flow, style,
detail/development, clarity, mechanical cleanliness,
conformity to curricular requirements (e.g., form),
effectiveness/cleverness in use of language and
language devices (e.g., simile, metaphor), and com-
plexity of thought.
These attributes might work well for the poem that’s clean as bone, but what about the messy language-y excess of the spam poem? Or what about the poem that dirties up mechanics for some other semantic or aesthetic impulse? what about the concrete poem or sound poem? how to evaluate these?
And how do you teach students to distinguish a good poem that follows aesthetic principals antithetical to their own from a bad poem that hits them where they live? To put it another way, how do you teach the music reviewer who’s a whiskey-soaked country fan to be able to praise a good death metal band and bring a sloppy roots band up short?
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
July 20th,2009
poetry |
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I’ve been reading through the excellent collection of essays in Poetry and Pedagogy, edited by the equally excellent Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr. It’s slow going, because the content is so rich, and each piece leads me to many spiralling paths.
Today, I skipped ahead to Charles Bernstein’s piece on Creative Wreading:
Confronted with a poem, many students, indeed many readers, seem to go silent or what they say tends to treat the poem as if it were not a poem at all but a statement of opinion, experience, or sentiment… My response to this chronic poetic aporia (CPA) is to provide intensive poetry immersion courses, something like teaching poetry as a second language. That means I try to immerse the class in a wide yet distinct variety of poetic forms, sounds, dictions, and logics. (274)
This is a very familiar scene and response. One tool he has developed is the “Poetry Profiler“. It provides a range of terms from the various rhetorical features one might encounter in a poem, and also provides a vocabulary to help students consider its social/historical context.
He asks students to first run the profiler on themselves, ranking their preference for each value. This process, he observes, often involves spending a few hours defining the terms.
One of the strengths of the tool is that it serves as a foundation for discussing the difference between personal aesthetic preference and the aesthetic value of a given poem.
As I continue to learn how significantly a reader’s aesthetic expectations shape their experience of a work, I can see that using a similar approach would help my students find their way into a greater variety of texts. They would begin to see their expectations as preferences, not preconditions.
I\
from Reading Affect in the Lyric, Charles Altieri
- to ask : “who the texts ask us to become if we participate in their particular ways of fusing sensation and imagination” (46)
- “Writing does not comment about what one is feeling, but makes articulate the actual event fo feeling as it takes place, or makes a place for itself” (55)
“writing (is) the locus of affective events.”
“The reader’s task is to find out where feelings lead and to test… what transitions their articulation makes possible” (56)
something happened. what happened?
“teaching poetry in this new world requires fresh attention to how intricately affects are woven into modes of attention (61).
phenomenology of the textual encounter.
