Antonio Hamilton
ADVENTURES OF BOOT CAMP: an ePortfolio
In a summer like no other, with the sun beaming from a distance, Antham began his journey to becoming a TA. We proudly present...
Reading responses
Bitzer – Rhetorical Situation
Bitzer discussion about rhetorical situations is an interesting one, and at first, I did not really see the applicable nature of this article. It seems to be more rooted in verbal communication and how a legitimate response to an adequate situation. But as I started to look at how could this apply to teaching and composition, it is how an argument is or could be structured in an essay. The steps are as follows: a situation calls for it, a fitting response to the situation, the response adheres to the requirements of the situation, the situation is objective, and the structure of the situation is either complex or simple. These steps would be a great way to introduce or structure critical writing to a composition class, as well as any class where composition is involved. When we go to make an argument, we find a topic is worth engaging with and we adhere to the requirements of the topic by researching relevant information and following the aspects of that genre that the topic belongs to. I think a lot of the times when discussing how to structure or come up with an argument, we try to give a detail description that sometimes confuses the writer about what the bare bones of the essay should look like. What Bitzer does is give the abstract layout about how structuring an argument without providing all the distracting detail. This allows the writer to focus solely on the goals they are seeking to achieve in their composition. I can potentially see myself having some type of multi-step assignment that a student would do before they begin writing their essay where they would have to address each one of these steps. Essentially, they would be describing how they will be tackling their argument before actually writing it. In that way, this operates as a pre-outline. I think many times when students begin to write their essays, they do not fully know what they want to discuss, so they try to just jump right into it. And even a basic outline the essay could prove difficult if they are not sure of the parameters of their argument, so this would help with achieving that.
Inoue - Racism in Writing Programs and the CWPA
Inoue speech brought a lot of important things, with the most important being that of racism and the stereotypes that are developed about minorities within the writing career field. I think that a lot of times we over look these sorts of issues because they are hard to talk about and even harder to fix, as Inoue discusses. His speech recalled a conversation I had with one of my undergraduate professors. She was telling me that before she came to UAF, at her old job, she was part of the faculty that helped decide who got hired when positions where open. She told me that one time they were trying to decide who they would hire for a professor position. One of the applicants was a white male and the other was a black woman. She told me that they actively discussed the politics of their race and gender as deciding factors of who they should hire and how uncomfortable she was discussing that. She understood that it matters, but the fact that it actually had to be discussed was the awkward part. And this is where I think the issues comes in; how much should someone’s race or gender play into hiring faculty. And does the hiring of diverse faculty members actually solve the problem? I would argue that it does not because the culture and atmosphere, as in the larger conversation does not change. I personal think that in regard to English, a lot of the texts that is covered is very white-male European based and this has become the mainstream. A variety of texts from different cultures and races was mainstream as well, this could present multiple representation of what English is, which could change the culture of how we teach, write, and discuss literature by not predominantly one image of what English can look like
Dirk – Navigating Genres
Dirk’s discussion of genres is quite interesting because Dirk tackles different aspects of it: popular genres, why we choose the genres we do, genre not be constant, and teaching rhetorical situations. I particular like how Dirk says that teaching popular genres is a good thing because it is what the students most relate to. And it also allows the instructor to draw connections to why the students like a particular genre to the conventions of that genre, enable them to recognize genre. This relates directly to Dirk stating that the reason we engage in the genres we do is because we know the what response it will get out of us. This is a vital part of genres because essentially it is highlighting the audience aspect of this communication binary: the genre and the audience. This can lead to getting students to recognize how to appeal/write to a certain audience. That can also lead to teaching how genre is constant because it is most likely that certain students are going to like certain genres for different reason. This is important to teach because high school, I feel, fails to teach rhetorical situations, so when some students come to college, it is really a logically leap we are asking them to take; from writing only one way to now writing multiple ways. The three genres project is extremely useful in this situation because it forces student to do, essentially, a case student of three different genres and look at all the aspects that Dirk discussed in his articles. Ultimately, I believe once again, that high school could do a better job of at least introducing this on some level, preparing students for college.
Yancey – Portfolios in Classroom
Reading more about Yancey’s ideas of portfolios was great especially at this point in the class as we reach the end. But reading had me question and pondering aspects about the benefits and negatives of doing a portfolio. She talks about how portfolios help in allowing the student to see their growth over a semester from start to finish. And agree with that but also slightly have an issue with it. If we allow for revisions on essays, then there really isn’t an authentic growth the students are going to see. And here is where it almost falls back to the focus on the individual essays instead of focusing on the collection of essays over the semester. Now, this isn’t a bad thing because individual essay focus has been the structure that these students probably learned in high school, so it seems to work in them learning how to write (excluded the content). But I think it comes down to what you want to focus on over the course of the semester. I think for grading, using a portfolio makes complete and total sense, instead of giving individual grades out. But to see growth, I think that depends on if revisions are allowed or not before the final grade. Doing as when they submit their work to the portfolio would show growth by the time they reach the end of the semester. Maybe allow revisions after they receive the final draft of an essay (and give them like one to two weeks) and they submit that revised draft to the portfolio and cannot make any more changes at that point. I feel like if you are going to use a portfolio, stuff like this is important and should be taken in account because there should be a clear purpose of it for the students to understand and learn from.
Daiker – Learning to Praise
I completely agree with Daiker’s article because I feel that there is almost a thirst for some English teachers to find all the errors in someone’s essay. There seems to be a shift in mentality from elementary school to middle school and higher when it comes to positive reinforcement. The institution seems to think that the older we get the less praise we need and any such praise is deemed as “babying.” There is a mentality that the less errors you make, the better you are doing./.; In this case, anything that is “positive” is coming from a negative place: not making errors. But if praised on what you are doing right is done, then I believe that you have more motivation to continue doing what is right, while also trying to correct what is wrong. Because English is a subjective subject, a lot of it depends on the confidence of the student. And a lot of students do not feel confident because they are afraid to make a mistake and to actually try. They are probably thinking about all the things they do wrong. But if you praised them on all the things they do right, then you help them build confidence. I say this because as a writing center tutor in my undergrad, I cannot even count how many students came in saying how bad they are at writing. So, shifting to a helpful mixture of praise and correction, I think will ease the student’s mind to be able to see all the errors, thinking they are a bad writer, but the good, showing them that they just have stuff to work on. It is much like a sport, if an athlete does something positive that helped the team win, they are going to do it again and praise the athlete for doing what they did. The same is for students, teach what they should always do, by praising them when they do it, so they don’t carry that issue with year after year.
Julianna made a comment about having a handout about an idea for a writing assignment I discussed in this response on the steps about structuring an argument. This just had me thinking that there is always extra material that we can come up with that may help the students succeed and that it is alright to do so.
Looking at Amy’s comment about how reading authors of color or having teachers or color had me think more about the difficulty of changing this norm. When the history of literature has focus on white writers, due to historical events, this just doesn’t affect the field of English but also the culture of society because laws and other such things are based off of white writers. So, created a diversity of literature from different races and perspectives will affect the culture in a better way.
Julianna had asked what did I think high schools could better prepare students for college composition since I started see how much these students come into college not really knowing about genres. I think that high school English could at the very least introduce writing for different audiences and not just for their teacher. This would prepare the students to tackle genre writing in college and they would have basic knowledge about rhetorical situations and audience.
Amy had made a comment of not really agreeing with my sentence: “If we allow…going to see,” and she asked me if I would explain a little bit more. So, what I was attempting to say that if the purpose of a portfolio is to show the growth of the student’s writing from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester, allowing them to revise all essays at the end doesn’t really display this purpose. This is because the writing at the beginning of the semester has been alter at the end of the semester, when their writing is probably better. So, I am basically proposing that final revisions of essays should be due at different points of the semester to encapsulate the meaning of the portfolio. This is just one perspective of looking at this.
Doctor Teague made a comment about how one thing being considered a mistake by one teacher and not by another. This had me thinking about how it is difficult and why teachers shouldn’t focus on the errors on in a student writing because I think that is why students end focusing more on making these small errors than content based material. So praising students on these big aspects will get them to focus on the aspects of their writing that I think really matters.