Enough from me! I’m beginning to sound didactic and stuck in my rut when really I think there are plenty of credible ways to teach well and to think about that work.

Good luck with your important curricular project — necessary work, often thankless, resisted, but so necessary.

p.s. I tried to comment on your blog, responding with concrete ways I “invite them in” but I’m not sure I did it right. Oh well!

So this part,

whether that’s gaining ability to work more thoroughly with academic texts or researching and responding to internship opportunities.

while perhaps a worthwhile sentiment, is just not the same page I’m on. It is very important for me and others in my position to consider this in a step-by-step fashion and make sure that the skills are being built upon because I’m dealing with students who have missed out on skills that are elem and middle school level.

I’ll say no more on the subject then! I think clearly this conversation is not applicable to me. I appreciate the opportunity to voice my thoughts in response, though (as always, Mike) because it’s always helpful to me to identify and solidify my ideas to talk about it.

I have little control over the curriculum or students’ transitions beyond my classes, and significant comp research indicates that concrete writing “skills” don’t seem to necessarily transfer across classes in tidy stepbystep fashion,

this is actually something that I’m charged with right now and that other people in gateway courses and beyond will soon be looking towards. We’re trying to improve our curriculum to insure that it does help students out in a step by step fashion or at very least, they are prepared for the next course, and it’s going to cause some ripples because not everyone is on the same page.

I’m working toward a work/play fusion - for me, for students in my classes, for my staff of writing tutors as well. Ideally: an integration of intellectual work/intellectual play in rhetorical environments worth the time and energy of everyone who enters. Definitely not just pleasure for the sake of pleasure, nor even a spoonfulofsugar pedagogy. I’m old, though, so I’m purely not willing to waste any more of my life in rooms of dread or duty, so I am wedded to a principle of pedagogical pleasure.

I can’t bear to think of courses as just means to the next course. (My middle schooler did the litany for me the other day: “We have kindergarten so we can learn how to do first grade. We have first grade so we can learn how to do second grade…” I was a little horrified.)

Though I agree Michelle, that it’s important for courses to have something to do with each other, and the concept of preparation has some merit. Since I have little control over the curriculum or students’ transitions beyond my classes, and significant comp research indicates that concrete writing “skills” don’t seem to necessarily transfer across classes in tidy stepbystep fashion, I think it’s important to be explicit with students that they are the ones who own the learning and have to figure out ways to adapt what they know for different contexts.

I try to conduct my courses so students are likely to 1) get/claim/discover real use value in the writing they do and 2) consciously transfer their developing rhetorical savvy to other writing situations. One end of semester reflection on what they’ve learned doesn’t cut it as an exercise in knowledge tranfer. It’s a constant insistence that students have the choice of permeating the borders of the classroom by working on writing that is of consequence to them — whether that’s gaining ability to work more thoroughly with academic texts or researching and responding to internship opportunities.

The work has to be useful to them (and me) on some level and there’s got to be some pleasure in the learning or it just seems a task of mysterious origin.

Most of my students do not view it as doom and punishment; they merely view it as something unmastered. They want to master something. Killing time until the end of class is a matter for only a small percentage of my students - I mean, the ones who stick around, of which I have a full class at least on MWF.

You could be specific, you know, about what you mean by inviting them in. I think I’ve been more specific in my criticism of creating assignments that do not prepare and why I’m criticizing it.

No worries about the commenting. I just didn’t want to hijack your comments here with something that was a bit of a tangent.

(Sigh. There he goes. He’s been into the Elbow again, hasn’t he?)

here

This is interesting because I’m not all about making writing interesting. I want to help my students overcome fears of writing and lack of basic skills that the public education system has left them with, and help them learn how to write essays for college. That’s it. I don’t care if they like writing. I just want to demystify it for them and make them believe they can do it for the sake of their purpose.

I teach basic writing, composition, literature and creative writing, and I’m not certain which side of the aisle I’m on regarding Collie and Michelle’s discussion–I think that what Collie is saying is that her bluntness and enthusiasm wakes up students who would otherwise snooze through out the semester, which doesn’t seem to me to be creating a “fun” class filled with no expectations but plenty of laughs and inflated grades. And believe me, I can be “no fun” in a poetry writing class when the students are trying to slack off. But the bottom line is that I can’t instill a desire or appetite in every one and that has to do with reasons beyond my ken.