cac.ophony.org

The most persistent psychological barrier to working on my dissertation is not the intimidating size of the project, or insecurities about its intellectual worth, or a lack of time to devote to it.  It’s not even my cac.ophony.org deadline.  What keeps me away from the library is the constant barrage of warnings about the doom that awaits the humanities Ph.D.  Articles that beg undergrads not to pursue useless advanced degrees arrive regularly in my inbox, forwarded sympathetically from the secure, salaried desk jobs of my smug friends outside academia.  Why, I wonder, should I spend my day squeezing one or two footnotes out of hours of reading?

Discouraged, I retreat to the most reliably mindless escapism I know of, a deeply trusted ally in the war against productivity: syndicated sitcoms.

Marge, how could you?

Each year, the Oxford American Dictionary names a neologism the “word of the year,” and this year it’s “unfriend,” a verb that means “to remove a friend from a social networking site.”  Pretty underwhelming.  I think we can do better.

Last week, Hyewon and David each wrote a post that registered some anxiety about the academic job market.  They reminded me that I need to jazz up my CV if I want to be among the mere 50% of the English Ph.D.s who receive a tenured professorship.  Unfortunately, I have no authentic edge over my brilliant competitors, so I have to stretch.  How about a new CV section, one that no one else will have?  “Neologisms Coined; or, My Personal Impact on the American Lexicon.”  Arranged chronologically, it will elaborate all the word inventions and new usages I have helped pioneer.

Rough Draft

2000: “seinfeld” [verb]: to interpret a real-life occurrence through the lens of the sitcom Seinfeld.  Often pejorative, meaning to analyze complex situations reductively in order to conform them to the plot-lines of a sitcom.  E.g. “This is the kind of situation that simply cannot be seinfelded.”

2006: “prebound” [verb]: to actively seek a new partner while still in a relationship; to delay a breakup until a rebound relationship is within view.  E.g. “I think Jeffrey and Tara will break up as soon as one of them finds someone new.  They’re both obviously prebounding.”

2009: “oblogation” [noun]: the obligation to contribute to a blog, often attached to a job or a casual agreement.  E.g. “The workload is light, except for a twice-a-week oblogation.” Or “I was excited to contribute to Antonio’s blog at first, but it’s become a burdensome oblogation.”

Well, that ought to impress the hiring committees, right?  There’s more work to be done with this inadequate language of ours, though.  Here’s a list of phenomena that still need words: when you introduce yourself to someone you’ve already met several times; when you realize halfway through telling a long story that you’re being rather dull; the weird but delightful way people act on an unseasonably warm winter day; etc.  Any suggestions?  Any words you’ve coined or repurposed?

And, how about a word for a blog post that’s gone on too long?

Worried about the low literacy levels and poor writing skills of college graduates, composition professors have spent decades debating the question: Should college writing courses teach content (critical reading and in-class debates about social and cultural topics) or form (essay design, paragraph arrangement, and sentence-level syntax, grammar, and vocabulary)?

To my mind, they’re chasing a red herring.  Once we’re actually in the composition classroom, we inevitably combine form with content, regardless of our theoretical pedagogical standpoint.  Anti-content-ers like Stanley Fish pretend that content-rich composition courses rely on “the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow.”  Of course, no one would base a curriculum on such an idiotic notion; rather, some instructors teach composition through thematic readings with the understanding that shared background knowledge will help students build more complex arguments; others use essays about “big ideas” as models students can emulate in their own writing.  Few anti-content teachers would deny the importance of building a knowledge base or following good writing models.  Conversely, even those pro-content composition instructors who strenuously declare, “I do NOT teach grammar,” ultimately are forced to attend to sentences in one way or another.

The Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar at City College of New York, profiled this month in Inside Higher Education, has provided a curricular counterpart to my claim that writing courses always combine form with content.  The six-credit seminar links a content instructor from one of the disciplines with a writing instructor from the English department, often a Master’s or MFA student.  So, the students learn about a subject–examples include “Energy” and “Comic Books and Conflict”–and they learn how to write about that subject.  Form enriched by content, content supported by form.

Of course, I would prefer to see universities take the writing instruction side of such courses a little more seriously; as the article explains, the content instructor is often the “real” (full-time, tenured) professor and the writing instructor is a contingent laborer.  But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Several semesters in a row, I taught Dante’s Inferno as part of a broad humanities survey.  In case you’re not familiar with the epic, the protagonist (also named Dante) travels through the Catholic hell and describes the excruciating torture experienced by the many sinners he sees there.

photo credit: country_boy_shane

My writing assignment asked students to analyze how the punishments match the sins committed.  It was so tedious.  I quickly realized I was sucking all the interest and fun out of an actually interesting and fun text.

So the next semester I made the writing assignment a bit more transgressive: “Have you ever told someone to ‘go to hell’ (or wanted to tell someone that)?  Describe the scenario.  What did the person do wrong?  Use quotes and interpretations of Dante’s Inferno to describe what their punishment would be and why.”  The assignment still met my pedagogical goals (to have the students think critically about the text and articulate connections between its parts), but the students’ answers were so much more engaged, and reading the essays was much less a chore for me.  Plus, as an accidental sort of value-added bonus, I think the assignment allowed the students to experience the cathartic, semi-therapeutic effects of imaginatively punishing people who’ve wronged them—an effect that Dante himself certainly relished in imagining his hell, which is littered with his personal enemies.

In later semesters I expanded this assignment to ask students to consign various historical and contemporary figures to the appropriate circles of Dante’s hell.  This added a component that I hadn’t originally considered, because it turned into a mini-lesson on both current events and notorious “sinners” from history.  It was also fun!

My only problem is, not every text I teach seems to lend itself to writing assignments that both achieve my goals (for them to become sharper critical thinkers and analytical writers) and engage students creatively.  Any ideas?  Anybody else trying to design these double-duty writing assignments?

Today I ran a writing workshop in a Great Works literature class, and I was surprised to find the class is held in a computer lab.

photo credit: ·júbilo·haku·

Don’t get me wrong: I heart the web.  My students and I blog together and exchange links, and I’ve been a longtime Blackboard defender.  But computers in my actual classroom?  I’m not so sure.

For the first five to ten minutes of the class, as I introduced myself and gave an overview of our objectives for the day, I was interrupted by thirty deafening renditions of the little tonal song Microsoft has chosen to indicate “Windows is starting up!!”  Then, when I put the students into groups, the long, u-shaped computer tables forced them to sit in awkward rows, and I found it difficult to rove from group to group to answer questions.  By the end of the workshop, I could see that some students were dividing their attention between me and the screens in front of them.

Rather than simply conclude that computers don’t work in a discussion-based classroom, I’m seeking some suggestions for how to make them work.  How could we use computers to keep students focused on content, rather than making content compete with the computers?