What has been bugging me about Jos. Harris for a week or so now
Something’s been bugging me for a week or so now about Joe Harris and A Teaching Subject and I think I’ve finally articulated what it is. I’m gonna go ahead and write about it at the risk of ruffling some feathers I’d rather not ruffle.
So: Yes, I think Harris’s aim of encouraging analytic thinking and recognition of one’s place in the midt of competing discourses is a great model for teaching comp. Further, it’s probably even the model I will use for my first few semesters as a new instructor. (Assuming of course my funding is renewed after Winter 2006.) But what has been nagging me about it?
Working in the writing center the other day (Tuesday), I helped a student, a middle-aged woman (very nice), who was coming back to school after marraige and three kids, having graduated high school 40+ years ago. She wanted some help on improving her writing generally, not just on a specific assignment. Nicole has the good idea to have her spend a few minutes writing a brief page on her return to school, which I then used as the basis for the lesson.
First: her writing wasn’t half-bad. True, there were problems to work with: simplistic sentence structure, subject-verb agreement, adjectival forms misused, punctuation errors. . .but she also had a strong sense of paragraph organization, and was in fact able, at one point, to build a complex sentence that made correct use of a colon and had all sorts of various clauses and whatnot.
As I tried to work through her writing sample with her, I found myself confronting a sort of painful realization: I recognized a lot of her errors, and could fix them for her, but I didn’t really have the body of knowledge, the simple know-how, to explain to her why they were errors, what the errors were called (in fancy grammar-talk), or necessarily how to explain the "correct" way of doing them.
This is what brings me to Joe Harris. As compelling as his model is, when I think about using it for my own classes, it seems. . .lazy. Not that you couldn’t build a rigorous, demanding syllabus from Harris’s model, but that deciding to focus on the analysis and thought behind student writing seems like a really easy out from having to memorize rules and guidelines about subordinate clauses and future perfect tenses and all that jazz. I know I’m a lit/cult guy, so maybe I can give myself a pass, but I really feel like not knowing this stuff diminishes what I can achieve with my students. What use am I to them if I can only tell them what errors they’ve made without being able to tell why they’re wrong and how to fix it?
I’m not feeling sorry for myself here the way I was in earlier posts about my various multiple countless personal defects. I’m trying to pose a real question about possible pedagogical models: When you decide to focus on one approach, what are you omitting that may benefit your pupils? Or: Is choosing one approach an admission of inability in another?
Obviously not all instructors will bring the same strengths or interests into their classrooms. One of my colleagues will likely move on to do great work with service learning and student advocacy and other great things that I just don’t have an aptitude for. Conversely, said colleague may not ever teach a course on the boundaries of the novel, as I’d like to some day. (Which is not to say you couldn’t, oh dear colleague of mine.) To restate my question once more in different fashion: How and when do we acknowledge our shortcomings (or maybe we can say our own learning opportunities) as pedagogues?
Well I don’t acknowledge my shortcomings to my students. I think there will come a time when I can, sometime midlife, when I’m not a stupid young’un or clearly senile, but that time is not now, not yet.
I did have one instructor (who shall remain nameless) who told us it was fine to admit fault–even big fault–to a student. It was fine to walk into class and say that you didn’t know something but you were all gonna learn it together.
Hrm, sorry, but I think that’s nuts. I had the advantage of seeing what her students thought of her BEFORE I was a grad student, and I can assure you it wasn’t pretty.
So what do you do?
Are you at all familiar with Richard Lanham? He’s got this nifty little book called Revising Prose wherein he teaches the Paramedic Method of revision. It’s a nifty little tool to fix lots of passive voice, subject/verb agreement problems, and students who use too many useless prepositional phrases. Using that tool allows me to say things like “Well, this sounds kinda clunky, read it out loud. There? Don’t you sort of hear that? Let’s figure out a way to say it differently.”
Secondly, you can always point out that various style guides have completely different rules for grammar. As such there really isn’t a right or wrong way. Undergrads really hate hearing that though. I’m happy with it, it gives me the excuse to say “Oh sorry, I was just doing it the Words into Type way…”
And lastly, I have a really nifty grammar text somewhere, but heck if I can remember its name other than the fact that the cover is a muted lime green color. That book taught all about these 10 basic sentence structures and ways of turning sentences around and cleaning them up and all sorts of good stuff. I can look it up if anybody’s interested, but I don’t think it’d make a good self study book–it was used in a 4000 level grammar course I had to take.
Comment by Jill — 21 September, 2006 @ 4:09 am
I’m glad to hear you voicing such concerns as you are exposed to more and more situations. No ruffling here.
I wonder, though, when you do teach boundaries of the novel, or some other course, and encounter the same type of student again, what will be your course of action?
I say that, assuming you will assign writing and not only exams.
I wonder also if you might think about another couple of angles to approach the very real problems you are noticing. One asks: If the recognition of error and the logic behind error is the “answer,” why has that strategy not saved writing instruction yet? Obviously, you are not the first to note this problem. See this week’s Crowley for some more thoughts on this matter.
Another might ask (and this I borrow from last week when we discussed repetition of faulty practice): Is it possible that the pedagogical system shares a huge blame for the repetition of problems we encounter? In other words, repeating old strategies that continue to fail (like showing a student why the error is an error) keeps the proliferation of error in circulation. What would it mean to shift or alter that pedagogy, and how?
For that, I give you this week’s readings on invention (and the later readings on grammar).
Comment by jeff — 21 September, 2006 @ 2:43 pm