When people ask me what I do, I often tell them that I work at a business school. Some of the more literary inclined people aren’t interested in my going into further detail, at least not until I tell them at every student at this business school is required to take a Great Works of Literature course. Baruch’s mission to instill ideas and culture and values into their students through literature is what, I think, makes Baruch unique among business schools. What is even more amazing is that this semester, Charles Simic is Baruch’s Harman Writer-in-Residence. I first read Simic’s poems when I was a junior in college. I loved his poems, his essays, his interviews. Later, when I went on to teach writing, I taught Simic. I still do. I am always in utter awe of him and his thinking about language, how it takes on another life that has something to do with this one. Writers-in-residence are usually found in MFA Creative Writing Programs or liberal arts undergraduate institutions. To have a Pulitzer prize winning poet who is also the Poet Laureate of the United States in residence at a CUNY business school is sure to baffle and confound. I can only think that such an occurrence must mean the planets and the stars and their positions right now are responsible, but I’m sure it must have something to do with someone at Baruch who believes that literature is what can change or shape the world and our ideas about our place in it.
Author Archive for Jenny
Somebody sometime was told by someone that the use of the passive voice is incorrect. Since that time, writing teachers have taken pen to paper to mark out, to rid the English language of one of its most poetic grammatical constructions: the passive voice.
I’m always surprised by how many writers and teachers of writing vehemently believe that the passive voice is wrong, in the same way that, say, subject-verb agreement errors are wrong.
If you’ve never considered this before, consider it now: style books are political. Moreover, they are personal and biased, based on the writer’s own predilections for language.
If I ruled the universe, students would not use style books to learn to write. They may read them in order to obtain an appreciation, however, of the opinions of other writers. To read about writing is a beautiful thing. What students would use to learn how to write would be great writing. (They would read Tristam Shandy.) Reading great writing is what teaches great writing.
And great writing is full of the passive voice; it breaks all the rules prescribed by handbooks on style.
In an attempt to declutter my life, I went through a box of old teaching materials–mainly old student papers that I didn’t know what to do with, hand-outs, and articles that I thought might prove useful again in the future.
I came across two things, however, that I couldn’t throw away because without such tactile evidence, I’m not sure anyone would believe me.
(I also just want to preface this with a statement on my views on plagiarism. I am not a witch-hunter or blood-hound when it comes to plagiarism. I do not fail my students. I do not give them F’s. I do not take plagiarism personally. Many of my students were students who needed a second chance in life, and I was happy to help them and not hold them back. I always gave them opportunities to correct their wrongs. In the second example below, however, the student adamantly denied having done anything wrong and chose not to redo his paper. I did fail that paper, but I didn’t fail him for the semester.)
The first item that I was unable to toss out was an essay on how to make Kool-Aid. That’s right. I was teaching a very basic composition class, and it was my first semester teaching. I hadn’t quite learned yet that there are ways to curb plagiarism in assignment design. My assignment was really bad–I simply asked my students to write an essay that explained how to do something, anything. One student, who was probably the worst student I had–he never came to class and didn’t seem to know how to write a complete sentence–turned in this marvelous gem. I, of course, handed it back to him with a print-out from the website stapled to his paper.
After class, he came up to me to say sorry, that he had written a paper, but he asked his cousin to type it up for him. She somehow ended up typing this Kool-Aid essay word for word.
My absolute favorite was from a student who wrote this letter to me when I stapled a copy of his source to his paper:
This letter is in regards to a paper I wrote on energy. Professor, I was very stunned and taken aback after being notified by you, that two lines in my paper should have been quoted from an already printed article. If I was aware that it was already in another article, I assure you, that I would have sited it. I am genuinely in shock and am having the most difficult time believing that lines that I sat and wrote on my own could have already been written up by some else. Ironically, I had not even seen the article, prior to your printing it out for me, and did not even visit the site the article is to be found on. To add to my dismay, my original sentences were, ‘As Congress ponders how the country can steer clear of a power disaster like the one that has affected
California , many people consider that only science-fiction can offer a long-term solution–a resolution in which discoveries in hypothetical physics would lead to an innovative energy-producing expertise. The fuel for this technology, as they envision it, would be copiously accessible, secure, economical and uncontaminated.’ After I had revised it, I had changed a few words around and unbeknownst to me, it became the same words as Mr. Travis Norsen’s.[sic]
What gems do you have hiding in your filing cabinet?
I can’t stand overhearing people on their cell phones. I can’t stand overhearing people having conversation. It’s not so much that I mind the invasion or the fact that people usually talk about private (rather private, sometimes too private) concerns in public, but rather the fact that all I hear is: “So yeah I was like you know and so I like you know told him yeah so and I was like so yeah like you know and he was like yeah so like yeah you know what I’m saying?”
I have no idea what language this is. This language seems to have its own rules and method of meaning, but it’s not one I want to learn or be around. It makes me angry.
What makes me more angry is hearing my neighbor’s rather lame attempts to play guitar when I’m trying to work in my office. I just blast my Glenn Gould. I figure that hearing real music might help him play real music. My other neighbor, on the other hand, is a professional pianist; I don’t mind hearing him at all. I welcome it.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind overhearing conversation if it were real conversation.
In so many classrooms, so many students raise their seemingly enthusiastic hands to say, “Uh, miss, do you like really want like our thesis to like you know be like that because in my like other class you know with my other professor you know like that would be like my professor like you know wanted the thesis to like be to the point like you know and that thesis is like you know what I’m saying?”
No, I have no idea what you’re saying.
Instead of interpreting this non-language, we should ask the student to clarify and speak intelligently.
My ancient Greek professor banned the expression “okay” in class. Expressions I would ban: so like yeah, you know, like, so like, yeah, but miss (why “miss” and not “Professor so-and-so?”), you know what I’m saying, and I was like so like.
I think you get my point.
Teaching effective oral communication should start at the most basic level. Don’t encourage students because they are asking questions; encourage them to ask intelligent questions intelligently. Don’t interpret them; force them to clarify.
I’ve been thinking a lot about aural communication lately, how, in classrooms, we oftentimes overlook the aural in favor of the oral. When we do provide aural instruction, we couple it with visual instruction. Write on the board! Entertain! Give the students something to look at! I’m one of those old-fashioned educators–I bemoan the current trend of fashioning educators as clowns and spectacle.
When I hear a student complain that a class is boring, I think of John Berryman’s lines in Dream Song number 14: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”
When I was in grade school, there was after-school training for competitions with other district schools. If you won, you went on to regional competition, and if you won at that level, you advanced to state. One of the activities I trained in when I was eight was a storytelling competition. The task wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to retell a story that you would have just been told. This training forced me to listen, to etch details in my mind, knowing that I would have to retell them. When this became easy, I began to interpret what I heard, to make connections, to go above and beyond the surface of what was presented. (I think this is why I didn’t do well in these competitions–even at a young age, I wasn’t keen on merely summarizing; I wanted to provide literary criticism as well.)
Somewhere along the way, (I don’t know when) I became a terrible listener. I’ll sometimes just slip into daydreams when I’m at a literary reading. I have to prompt myself to listen. I have to concentrate. When someone reads something aloud to me, I invariably begin to go elsewhere unless I try really, really hard to stay there in the passage. I retain better when I look at the text, and I don’t think this is a good thing. It’s probably something that starting happening by my being immersed in classrooms that coupled aural and visual instruction in the belief that children learn better this way. I think it’s hurt me.
We let our students read aloud things that are beautiful, that should not be read aloud by fumbling, untrained students–Shakespeare for example. (No wonder our students have a hard time listening!) Why don’t we let them listen to trained actors on tape? Or on an MP3 player? I recently saw a news clip that showed MP3 players being used in public school classrooms. I have reservations about a gadget, however, that allows us to pause and resume, allowing us the safety of getting lazy, of drifting off.
Perhaps students are bored because they aren’t listening or don’t know how to listen. They’re elsewhere. Perhaps they have no inner resources, or perhaps they have too many inner resources.
We train our students to be articulate, eloquent speakers, but are we training them to be alert, contemplative listeners?
Perhaps I stand in a unique position, having worked at several Writing Centers, but I found the following video especially revealing of the disconnects between Writing Centers and assumptions about Writing Centers from students and instructors alike.
Instructors oftentimes think that Writing Centers are “sanitizing centers” or “correctness centers” or (gasp!) “proofreading centers.” Instructors will oftentimes send students there in the belief that the student will turn in a “readable” paper. When the paper is turned in and there are grammatical errors, instructors will conclude, quite mistakenly, that the tutors at the Center are inept.
Students, unfamiliar with Writing Center pedagogy, think that their errors will be corrected for them. I can still see quite clearly the very shocked faces I would get from my tutees when I would tell them, “Let’s just work on your thesis. After we get a good thesis, you’ll go home and rewrite your paper from it.” “But I want to work on my grammar,” the student would say, “because it’s due in fifteen minutes.”
There is a strange culture in our classrooms that equates correctness with success; the culture of Writing Centers equates improving over time and self-efficiency as routes to success. When we tell our students that an error-free paper will earn them an A, we forsake critical thinking, creativity, and eloquence.
Disclaimer: The views stated here are not the views of any Writing Center at any institution. The views are of the author’s and the author’s alone.
Our culture values the best, and when it comes to writing, the best is no exception. The Houghton Mifflin Company publishes a “Best American Series,” which promises to bring the reader a portmanteau of the best of the best, lest busy readers miss out on the creme de la creme of what they should be, but do not have time to read. (FYI: The Best American Poetry series is published by Scribner–this is a distinction that I have often felt strongly about for no particular reason other than my acute concern for trivial details that everyone else seems to overlook.)
What is missing in all of this best! writing are academic essays. We want our students to write well; we want them to write better; we want them to write best!, but we don’t provide any models for them to emulate. When I was studying poetry, I learned more from trying to emulate poets than I did from reading criticism; similarly, during my undergraduate years, when I couldn’t break out of my A- philosophy paper slump–you see, I wanted to write the best! philosophy papers–I very shyly, but slyly, asked a classmate who was getting As if I could see her papers. The A’s started pouring in for me.
Without best! models to work from, I really don’t know how we expect our students to write. After all, the writing that they are reading isn’t the type of writing we want them to write. This is very confusing. Calculus students have examples in their textbooks that guide them to problem solve; writing students don’t have this step-by-step guidance. Even in a class where personal essays are read, we don’t want for students to write in this essayistic mode. (We occlude the true meaning of essay when we talk about essays.) I’ve never assigned reading in a composition course that looked anything like the writing I needed for my students to write. I say “needed” because what my department wanted and what I would have liked to have read were, unfortunately, two very different things.
Whenever I get a particularly creative or top-notch piece of student writing, I always ask the student for a “clean” copy of the piece for my “brag file.” The student is always flattered and always happy to comply. When showing these works to future students, I just black out (or, if you prefer, white out) the names of the students. After a few semesters, you will have enough best! student writing to compile your very own Best Academic Essays. You could, if you wanted, have these writings made into a course packet each year instead of making photocopies yourself.
I often find that it is best! to go over these best! essays in class. That way, your students will know what you value and what they should too. I can’t promise that you’ll get the best! essays with this method, but you will get better essays; I do believe that better is better than what you would have gotten had you not given your students best! models from which to work.
We want our students to be able to write. We want them to write well. We want for them to be able to articulate eloquently their thoughts on what they have written and what they have read. Educators seem to agree, rather vehemently at times, that students lack critical skills and, when it comes to discussion, are unable to back up any claims they have or argue their points in an intelligent and effective way.
Composition 101 has long been regarded, almost without question, as the “required writing course.” Yet, students don’t really learn how to think more critically in these courses and therefore continue to churn out, in all of their coures, poorly written essays with lukewarm thoughts and little substance.
Creative writing courses, on the other hand, are regarded as “electives”–courses that only “artistic” types take or, mistakenly, a way to get an easy A. The creative writing course, however, seems to strive towards effective communication, analysis, argument and thesis development, critical thinking, eloquence, articulation, and correct writing.
In a typical creative writing class, students will read difficult works of fiction and poetry. They will be asked to discuss the most minor details of these works and be able to back up any statement they make with not only textual references but also with interpretive skills that may call on what they have read before.
Additionally, students will “workshop” their classmates’ writings, applying the same critical and analytical skills that they will have gained by reading and discussing published works of literature, both contemporary and canonical.
(During a typical workshop, the student whose work is being discussed is not allowed to speak until the end, at which time she may ask questions. I find, however, that most students want to defend their writings or say, “This is what my writing means,” a practice that I discourage.)
A good creative writing teacher will not allow her students to merely say, “I really liked this” or “I didn’t like this.” Students must say why. The writing workshop is an exercise in close reading and critical commentary. I make my students read and comment directly on their classmates’ writing before the workshop. They must come to the class prepared to speak. The workshop, therefore, requires that students both write and orally communicate their thoughts.
And I don’t let anyone hide. In a typical workshop, a student will have articulated his or her thoughts an average of five times. If four workshops are conducted in a two hour class, each student will have spoken 20 times.
There certainly are enough MFA in Creative Writing graduates to fill the demands of the writing curriculum at American colleges, but I can already hear the cries of our composition-rhetoric colleagues protesting that creative writing is not a critical or academically rigorous discipline. I read more during my two-years as a MFA student than I have as my four years as Ph.D. student in English. A typical Tuesday assignment (for Thursday’s class) from my creative writing professor was: read George Steiner’s After Babel, Robert Lowell’s Imitations, Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself; find a poem and translate it in the three modes of translation according to Steiner; find three different translations of Dante’s Inferno and report back on which translation is more effective and why based on content and prosody (prosody being my professor’s seemingly harmless way of saying “every poetic device,” so you had better scan the poems before coming to class because you might be asked about how a certain trochee affected the poem); and email, by Wednesday midnight, a three-page essay on one poet in The Poem Itself and how you might read this poet according to After Babel.
On Thursday, we would discuss all of this and more. We would read and analyze our classmate’s translations. We would have to eloquently articulate our thoughts and integrate, into our conversation, our readings throughout the semester.
We polished our poems before we photocopied them for our professor and classmates. We went over them endlessly, revising and perfecting, taking into account the comments of our teacher and classmates and our own developing artistic and critical sensibilities. We questioned our revision choices; sometimes we went back to our original plans. But we were revising, and we were revising in a way that was intended to please us, not to get a higher grade.
For us, revising was high stakes: it was on a level that was critical, personal, artistic. The revisions we made seemed to change the world, or our places in that world. It seems to me that this is the way writing, critical thinking, and communicating ought to be taught.
I like to think of myself as a somewhat semi-informed person, but apparently I’ve been in the dark about the issue of net neutrality and how Big Business is threatening the way we use and navigate the internet.
I learned that the United States has fallen behind in internet speed–we’re worse than 10th place when it comes to delivering content. All the marvels and miracles of the internet, such as conferencing with medical specialists and virtual classrooms, require fiber-optic internet connections, which phone companies promised to build in the 1990s and never did.
Now these very same phone companies want to charge internet sites a fee that determines how quickly their pages load. This means that if your blogging site can’t afford the fee, your site may never load. In the same way that the channels on TV and radio and cable are owned by a handful of corporations, so too might the internet be owned by a few corporations, thus censoring free speech and commerce.
The work that we do as educators is already so pushed into the margins of commercial America. How much more invisible will a non-neutral net cause us to be? I can see helpful sites, such as the OWL at Purdue, the Dante Project, or our very own cac.ophony getting pushed into the “slow lane” of a non-neutral internet. These phone companies are, I kid you not, trying to convince us that the internet has “lanes of traffic.”
For more information on net neutrality and how it affects us, please go to Save the Internet.com.
At the Academic Integrity Conference at Baruch College on Friday, March 9, I attended a session called “Student Top Ten.” The goal of this session was to come up with a “top ten” of ways that students can “move the academic culture on their campus towards a culture that values integrity.” (This wording was taken from the conference program). The session’s participants included administrators from the CUNY system, a librarian, faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students from both Baruch and the Graduate Center.
Our attempts to come up with a “Student Top Ten” seemed to center on grading and what faculty could do to ensure that students weren’t being graded unfairly. There was also much talk about what faculty could do to help students discuss their grades with students more openly.
To dismiss any talk of grading while thinking of academic integrity, I asked why students are not valuing learning for learning’s sake, but the discussion circled back to grading. Perhaps it was my idyllic undergraduate years, spent amid the Blue Ridge mountains and lilac and dogwood trees, studying philosophy and liberal arts, that fostered a false sense of how others view learning. I always thought of learning as discovery, risk-taking, and creative thinking, but it seems as if some think of it as gaining an unfair advantage or finding ways to ensure an “A” in the class.
When I taught composition, I would always remind my students that grades were never assigned, but rather they were earned. I would be happy to talk to them about their strengths and weaknesses, but I would never discuss grades.
Grading, it seems, isn’t going to be done away with, at least not in the CUNY system. Given this, what might be some items to include in a Student Top Ten? How can we talk about academic integrity without circling back to grading?
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