Wayne Booth: A God Among Men
I confess I enjoyed this reading, on the whole–even if it only exacerbated my anxieties about getting back into the academic arena. I’m (usually) confident of my abilities as reader, writer, and critic, but since I’ve never been called upon to teach before. . .well, I’m sort of putting a lot of faith in Dr. Rice’s course to prepare me for next semester. What I’m happy to hear and read though–albeit in a sort of schadenfreude way–is the repeated assertion of experienced professors that they, too, were at one time greenhorn GTAs.
Some other thoughts about this reading:
- Not to sound like I thought an academic career was some cushy gig where you do naught but read and teach all the livelong day, but the Booth reading emphasized just how much there is to an academic career. I don’t think I was ignorant of this before, just maybe the reading made me confront it a bit more consciously. Between the demands of department meetings, scholarship, guest lecturing, etc., I can see where the emphasis on teaching can fall to the wayside. Booth raises an interesting question: Are those of us who decide to enter academia primarily teachers who engage in scholarship (in order to further our careers) or primarily scholars who engage in pedagogy (in order to keep the bills paid between books and articles)? I suppose it’s mostly a matter of personal priorities, but. . .it sure seems churlish to claim the latter.
- Booth seems to be a very engaged instructor, at least based on his notes to his students that form part of the reading. I’ve always admired in my instructors when they acknowledge other essays I’ve written for them–it makes it seem as though the essays form part of an ongoing dialogue with the instructor.
- That said, at one point Booth chides one of his students for turning in a paper that, he indicates, is not up to her usual standard. I’ve been mulling this over: is this really a fair standard of assessment? I suppose it’s a sign of the prof’s confidence in the student to say "your work is usually good; what happened here?"–but I also think that she should be judged on the paper’s individual merits as measured against her classmates’ achievement on the same assignment. This might be the case, since Booth doesn’t tell us what score the paper was given, but his note seems very disappointed in his student.
- About grading standards: Any advice from those of you who have taught before about lowering personal standards to a realistic level for classroom use? Cindy and Nicole mentioned this is the Writing Center meeting on Friday, in suggesting that our work there will expose us to some of the writing talent (ahem) in the University. I’m still anxious, though, that I’ll end up being too harsh on my students–writing comes easily to me (usually), and I’ve not yet honed my patience for those to whom writing does not.
- How do you teach freshman comp if you’ve never taken it? I tested out of it by taking AP comp exams, so I’m not exactly sure how/what/why assignments to issue next semester. I’ll be handle lit classes with much less stress, since I’ve had dozens of those. But these comp classes have got me a little on edge.
To bullet point 1:
I keep on retyping this, because there are any number of things I could say here, that would probably better be put in my old response to the essay. So I’ll keep it brief and bullet like in response:
You are whatever you tenure contract wants you to be.
You may feel like you are something entirely different from your tenure contract.
Lacking a tenure track position, you can easily fall into “all teacher, all the time” mode, missing the fact that you can still be a researcher.
Go into another field, like engineering, and everybody is a scholar that engages in pedagogy. The liberal arts and humanities lean more toward pedagogists that engage in research–but research is what gets you known, paid, and er… laid… to complete the saying….
To bullet point 3: I think you eventually get a feel for what freshman writing is, what 2000 level writing is, and so on. I’ve taught multiple levels of writing courses at once (guh… and never again, but that’s beyond the point), and it was clear that students needed to learn certain things in comp 1 in order to survive in comp 2. If there was anything I could see that would give me an idea of where my standards need to be at WSU, it would be to see the sort of writing that a student is expected to complete in later courses. That’s where I pull my standards from (other than the obvious…)
Comment by Jill — 05 September, 2006 @ 9:12 pm
On grading and personal standards . . .
I think that’s why working in a writing center is a really useful step to come before actually working in a classroom. While what you’ll see there isn’t necessarily some of the best student work you’ll ever run across, it should give you an idea of the areas you need to emphasize when it comes to teaching your own class. For example, a lot of people are tempted to assume that teaching intro comp involves correcting spelling and punctuation, because the students have already gotten the basics. Actually, it involves unteaching the five paragraph essay and starting all over again with the basics. Not the the “This is a noun, this is a verb, and this is what you do with a period” basics, but you’ll need to teach them about thesis statements and how to write an essay that’s about one topic and sticks with that one topic. You’ll need to teach them how to organize their thoughts into coherent paragraphs, then organize those paragraphs into a coherent paper.
Don’t worry. You’ll know long before you get into the classroom what your general expectations ought to be. And then, once you get back the first round of essays from your class, you’ll know what the specific expectations for that specific group of writers ought to be.
Comment by Ellen — 06 September, 2006 @ 12:43 am