Preview this article: Can an English Teacher Contribute to the Energy Debate?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/43/6/collegeenglish13778-1.gif

Preview this article: Shared Responsibility: Teaching Technical Writing in the University, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/43/6/collegeenglish13774-1.gif

Preview this article: Notes from the Ground Down (or Ground Up): Insecurity Anxiety, and the Teaching of Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/43/4/collegeenglish13796-1.gif

Secondary English teachers are in trouble, and they need our help, particularly in the design of curriculum and in the application of research to practice. School committees and Time magazine blame the high schools for the writing crisis, the reading crisis, and the mathematics crisis. High-school English departments are responsible for two of these three R subjects, and the back-to-basics movement has subjected these English teachers to intense pressure not only from the public but also from a publishing industry which is hustling curriculum materials of all kinds, offering a quick fix for a quick buck. Besieged on all sides, the high-school English teacher is an embattled colleague, and college and university English departments must help. Furthermore, in-service teacher training has an effect that is wonderfully broad. One high-school teacher will work with as many as 150 students in a year. If we can increase that teacher's effectiveness and if that teacher continues in the profession for ten years, we have improved the secondary education of nearly 1,500 students. These students will, many of them, appear in college classes. To the extent that they do, we become direct beneficiaries of our own good works. So much for noblesse. In-service teacher training is an activity that also serves our own unenlightened professional self-interest. First, it does not demand from us mas-

BECAUSE THE FRESHMAN COMPOSITION CLASS is usually the students' first introduction to college, what better place to challenge sexist reading, writing, and thinking? What better place to help students understand the relationship between language and thought? Instead of grammar-book rules that instruct students to avoid the masculine pronoun when gender is unclear, classroom activities can encourage students actively to explore their sexist values and draw their own conclusions. These activities should attack sexism at its roots by examining the cultural conditioning which both encourages faulty thinking and limits options for women and men. At the same time, through an examination of sexism, teachers can get at some of the students' persistent writing difficulties, such as generating essay topics, supporting topic sentences with sufficient proof, and selecting appropriate words and tone. Even though students have read and written for the better part of their lives, they seem unaware of the power of language to condition minds. They do not recognize that the assumption that males hold all prestigious positions lies behind the business correspondence salutation of Dear Sir. Nor can they identify the cultural bias toward single women reinforced by the titles Mr., Mrs., and Miss. If confronted directly with this sexism, many students acquiesce by using Ms. and by revising all he pronouns to read he/she. Nonetheless, they view such practices as arbitrary, senseless, and bothersome. A study of the causes and effects of sexist language can be integrated with and grow naturally from existing course structures and objectives. The three activities which follow are designed to explore the implications of sexism while building reading and writing skills. The first comprises word lists that develop awareness of sexist language used in literature and in students' own writings, while the second explores fairy tales that, like other literature, transmit sex role stereotypes and biases. The third considers research topics related to the two preceding activities. These three activities can be arranged in several sequences to develop writing objectives. For example, a teacher who views writing as a discovery process might use the following sequence: (1) students look at the data in the Hemingway passage from differing viewpoints, manipulate the data, and form tentative hypotheses; (2) students, in a

Preview this article: Cumberland, Kotzebue, Scribe, Simon: Are We Teaching the Wrong Playwrights?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/43/1/collegeenglish13834-1.gif

A BRILLIANT AND NOTORIOUS EXPERIMENT, whose implications for literary teachers and scholars have not been realized, was recently conducted by Chuck Ross. He simply typed up Jerzy Kosinski's novel Steps, which had been published in 1968, had won the National Book Award in 1969, had sold 400,000 copies and was still in print, and sent the typed copy under a false name to fifteen publishers and fifteen agents, as if it were a new submission by an unknown author. Without exception, all-including the novel's actual publisher-rejected the work, usually on the basis that it was inferior. Ross concludes his case against the selection process of the commercial publishing houses with some interesting statistics. According to him, Viking published only one unsolicited manuscript out of approximately 135,000 that had been submitted to them in twenty-seven years, and Random House's score was one published unsolicited manuscript in twelve years, out of 60,000 to 70,000 submissions. As Ross comments, he can scarcely believe that more of these manuscripts were not worth publishing.' For the university literature teacher interested in the health of his own field, Ross' work implies two major and unpleasant questions. First, how many unpublished works of literary of past and present periods have we as scholars missed totally because they died in the clutches of commercial publishers' readers, or because we allowed them to die from other causes? And by high literary quality I mean highbrow works of poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction that deal with human thoughts, emotions, and affairs with sensitivity, depth, and seriousness; I do not refer to the works of popular literature which currently receive so much attention from university critics and teachers and presses, whether deservedly or not. We seem to assume that a book is worthwhile only if it finds a commercial or university publisher, because we devote ourselves exclusively to books that have been so published. We even seem to prefer, for teaching and writing purposes, a published popular work to a serious but unpublished or privately published literary attempt. Yet, as Ronald Sukenick has recently pointed out, anyone who really wants to know

Preview this article: Perception and Change: Teaching Revision, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/42/3/collegeenglish13854-1.gif

With the making of poetry, or not-thinking represents a real, an ironic, choice. At the heart of the continuing controversy over the value of the university a life devoted to poetry is the anti-institutional, even anti-intellectual role that poets in their work and personal styles have taken up h9recent years. In the study and practice of any art other than poetry we find less conflict and confusion, fewer outright attacks on the university-or on any other institution-as a helpful ally. But poetry as a living art particularly commits itself to the personal above all else-to personal survival-which with us often goes along with an anti-institutional stance. Richard Hugo, a fine poet and teacher from Montana, talks about our loss of crucial life-supports in a new book about the teaching of poetry-writing, Triggering Town (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). The accelerated rate of loss . . . accounts, he claims, for the increasing number of people writing poems (p. 73). He points to the essential appeal of such activity on campus when he says, A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters (p. 65). What's irreplaceable in poetry is its personal quality: the intimate, unique gesture, the private, even quirky, perception of people and place, idea and language. Perhaps it is simply economic determinism, but since more and more often poets do work at universities, the open romantic gesture of entire disdain the academy as a stultifying place an artist is encountered much these days. Such resistance takes more covert forms: inner exile, clownishness, views favoring severe primitivism . . . and various honorable forms of not thinking such as Zen Buddhism espouses. social critic Martin Green made a title a provocative book out of Auden's

Preview this article: Three Poets on the Teaching of Poetry, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/42/2/collegeenglish13862-1.gif

Preview this article: Teaching Fiction in the Culture of Optimism, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/42/2/collegeenglish13860-1.gif

PICK UP ANY RECENT PUBLICATION on composition and you will almost surely find some reference to the problem of evaluating writing. Teachers and researchers alike acknowledge that pronouncing judgment on a piece of writing is both important and difficult. Important because teaching students to write, sorting students for placement or admission, and research in composition all depend upon ability to discriminate levels of quality in writing. Difficult because the theoretical basis of evaluation remains unarticulated. In contrast, composition instruction has begun developing a coherent set of assumptions. For example, theorists may disagree on the relative merits of classical, tagmemic, dramatistic, and prewriting forms of invention, but they agree on the principle that invention is part of the writing process. Evaluation of writing proceeds without a similar set of principles. Yet evaluation does proceed. The need for deciding who shall attend which college, designating those competent to graduate from high school, identifying growth in writing, or determining our nation's educational progress have spawned various systems for evaluating writing. Holistic scoring, quantification of syntactic features, analytic scales, and primary trait scoring illustrate the range of existing methodologies for evaluating writing. Rather than evolving from commonly held assumptions about evaluation, each method rests upon its own set of assumptions. Statistical computations of reader responses provide the rationale for holistic scoring and analytical scales; developmental stages of language acquisition account for quantification of syntactic features; a triangular model of discourse underlies primary trait scoring. Each of these systems and the assumptions underlying it represent careful and intelligent thought, and my purpose here is not to denigrate any of them. I cite them simply as illustrations of my point. Driven by the necessity to evaluate writing, theorists have avoided examination of the nature of evaluation itself and have moved directly to devising means (and rationales for these means) for accomplishing this difficult task. In this article I wish to propose a more general theory of evaluation and to suggest how it might be worked out in practical terms. This theory grows out of a philosophical and linguistic debate on the question of meaning. The debate, best summarized by P. F. Strawson's distinction between

Preview this article: "Flowers in the Path of Science": Teaching Composition Through Traditional High Literature, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/42/1/collegeenglish13870-1.gif

MY PURPOSE IN THIS PAPER IS THREEFOLD-hiStoriCal, descriptive, and also, alas, nowadays contentious. After a brief historical excursus on the changed relation between composition and literature teaching, I want to describe what is, for the 1980s, a rather unusual kind of freshman writing program, one that combines intensive work in composition with an old-fashioned literary survey. Through this description I shall argue that modern, professionalized writing specialists have become unnecessarily suspicious of traditional literary reading assignments; that the educational functions of reading assignments have often been misunderstood; and that those functions can, at least for some students, better be fulfilled by traditional, substantive literary texts, than by the more commonly used collections of modern controversial, expressive, and affective prose. Finally, I hope to suggest, from our experience at the University of South Carolina with a special traditionally-oriented freshman program, that the ideas of freshman rhetoric can help in designing useful reading and writing assignments in other undergraduate literature courses. When the first-ever professorship of English was established, by the patronage of

WHERE DO ENGLISH TEACHERS GET THE AUTHORITY to teach writing to students from other departments? We know-and our non-English colleagues know-that the English major is basically an English and American literature major and that graduate programs in English are more of the same, only intensified. How then are we equipped to teach students whose present and future writing tasks are very far from the literature we study? At times in my career as an English teacher I've felt myself beset by people from other departments who understandably want an answer to that question. Now that I teach technical writing rather than Freshman English in my department's composition program, I feel myself more frequently under siege. Maybe Freshman English, the question goes, but technical writing? How dare I presume to teach chemical engineers, or astrophysicists, or biochemists how to write? Technical writing taught by English teachers is the acid test of our authority; in spirit as well as subject it seems to be at the farthest remove from nearly everyone's idea of literature. Three members of the Department of Humanities, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan have launched an especially pointed attack on English departments' teaching technical writing. J. C. Mathes, Dwight W. Stevenson, and Peter Klaver list three reasons for their doubts about letting someone from the English department teach technical writing. The first and second reasons appear to me indistinguishable, but come down to these two passages:

Preview this article: Developmental Perspectives and the Teaching of Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/7/collegeenglish13893-1.gif

Preview this article: Opinion: In the Business World and in Academe: The English Teacher in the 1980s, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/7/collegeenglish13900-1.gif

Preview this article: Teaching the Text(ual), Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/6/collegeenglish13905-1.gif

Preview this article: Language Acquisition and the Teaching and learning of Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/4/collegeenglish15983-1.gif

Preview this article: To High School and Back: Some Notes on a Teacher Exchange, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/3/collegeenglish15991-1.gif

Preview this article: Teaching Literature in Prisons, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/3/collegeenglish15990-1.gif

Preview this article: The Teacher of Modern American Indian Writing as Ethnographer and Critic, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/2/collegeenglish16004-1.gif

LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN College and Communication, a graduate student just through a doctoral examination in History and Theories in describes his need keep myself in one theoretical piece. . ., to get my future in composition straight, get it to take on some shape or direction (Stephen North, Composition Now: Standing on One's Head, 29 [1978], 178). One of his examiners called his synthesis of history, theory, pedagogy a mishmash; he is now laboring to find sensible relations between theory and the teaching of freshman composition. In spite of a dutifully upbeat conclusion, the article conveys frustration and insecurity-a nagging fear that the whole enterprise has been in some fashion hollow and suspect: it's rather like lying on your back in the backyard on a clear summer night and calling that astronomy (180). The anxiety described and dramatized here strikes me as largely justified and likely to become common as graduate programs in the theory and teaching of composition proliferate. What composition studies now offer is a potpourri of theory, research, speculation, some of it close to pedagogy, some far removed, some of it speculative and contemplative, some scientifically and experimentally oriented, some of it jargon-ridden and pretentious, enough of it so provoking and stimulating that the pervading sense of excitement and challenge seems justified. What composition research does not offer is a shapely coherence that makes it definable as a discipline. On the contrary, the spirit of the moment calls for ranging across multiple

Preview this article: Forms, Origins, Context: On Teaching Function, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/1/collegeenglish16024-1.gif

Preview this article: Reluctant Readers and a Controversial Classic: Teaching "Benito Cereno", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/41/1/collegeenglish16023-1.gif

Preview this article: "A Whole New Poetry Beginning Here": Teaching Lesbian Poetry, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/40/8/collegeenglish16030-1.gif

THIS ESSAY IS A COURSE DESCRIPTION, but it is also an argument. I would like to use it to give an overview of a course that I have been teaching for three years now, and in the process, I would like to present some proposals about pedagogy in general, about teaching introductory literature courses, about women writers, and about the relationship between feminism and literary study. Some of what I have to say will be familiar, for, although my course is not, strictly speaking, a Women's Studies course, it is in large part a response to the kinds of issues which Women's Studies has been raising, and a great deal of the strength of the course derives directly from what I have learned from my contacts with academic feminism. The course could not have come into being without the work that has been done by feminists in over the past five or six years. My approach to feminist issues, however, is, I hope, fresh enough to justify my writing this piece, and the arguments I want to present are, I hope, sound and useful enough to be valuable to teachers who teach, think, and write about literature both within and outside the structure of a Women's Studies course or program. My course comes to rest right at the junction of several ways of thinking: it combines a shamelessly old-fashioned critical emphasis on theme and character with a new moral and political vision. The hybrid thus created has yielded gratifying results, and I want to recommend the informing ideas of the course to a wide variety of teachers of English. The approach I have developed works no miracles, but it does, I think, provide a coherent framework for exploring the pleasures and seriously confronting the questions that follow when one gives assent to the most basic feminist arguments. That approach, quite simply, is this: I teach a body of good literature, all written by women, and I teach it as specifically female writing; I encourage the students to read for ideas first; I do not ignore my own gender (about which more later); and I try to direct the students toward the kinds of moral and sexual-political insights that are to be found in women writers' vision of the world-especially their vision of the male half of it. English 160/Images of the Male in Women's Writing, was inspired by this passage in Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957):

Preview this article: Teaching Griselda to Write, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/40/8/collegeenglish16033-1.gif

TEACHING WOMEN'S POETRY IS, I think, nearly always a struggle: it is an effort to overcome most students' resistance to reading poetry at all, to encourage them to be open to the personal immediacy, the urgency, the language, and rhythm that characterizes so contemporary women's poetry. Teaching lesbian poetry is even more difficult: both teachers and students bring to it a multi-layered set of assumptions that must be dealt with before the poetry itself can be explored. An unknown to most teachers, lesbian poetry, like lesbianism, is understandably threatening. When we think about teaching lesbian poetry for the first time, uwhat most of us feel is scared. We hesitate to write about it in detail (if at all) for the same reasons that we hesitate to emphasize it-or even discuss it-in class and out: the fear of losing our job, of being denied tenure; the fear that, regardless of our sexual and affectional preference, we will be dismissed by our students as just a lesbian; the concern that students who feel hostile or skeptical, or even friendly toward feminism and the women's movement, will be irretrievably lost if too much attention were directed toward the issue of lesbianism; the doubts about our colleagues' reactions to what we teach and how we teach it; the threat that the validity of a hard-earned women's course, women's studies program, or women's center w ill be undercut, and funding jeopardized, if it becomes perceived as a dyke effort.1 Nothing can be said that w ill allay these fears, most especially for those of us uwho are lesbians. For those of us who want to remain in academia, the choices are painful. We can choose to be public about our lesbianism and run the attendant gamut of

Preview this article: Images of Men and Maleness: A Thematic Approach to Teaching Women Writers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/40/8/collegeenglish16032-1.gif

Preview this article: "Full of Memories": Teaching Matrilineage, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/40/8/collegeenglish16031-1.gif

DURING THE LAST CLASS MEETING of every term, routinely ask my students to evaluate the course they have just finished and my performance as their instructor. From their remarks, often learn as much about their attitudes towards learning and their expectations of an education as do about my own strengths and weaknesses as a teacher. Last fall, when read my sophomores' evaluations of the English literature survey that taught, was disturbed to find these comments, among others like them, about the examinations had given: Discussion question counted to [sic] much; Maybe ask more Fill in blanks & Multiple choice. Some comments about grading always expect, but here the occasional complaint that graded too rigorously was incidental to a more basic objection. They were protesting that demanded of them too much writing, and they were volunteering that were both more appropriate and more desirable than the discussion had asked. For several reasons, this round of complaints gave me pause. In the first place, had not forced them to overexert themselves writing. Over the course of the semester, essay questions counted for only a little more than half the total number of points on their tests. Secondly, this was not the complaint of a single malcontent, for the theme surfaced in the evaluations of a large portion of the class. Finally, the more pondered their comments about writing in relation to objective questions, the more unnerving found their implications. What my class was suggesting in effect challenged some of the very premises of a humanistic liberal arts education-that is, precisely the kind of education in which the study of literature is important and meaningful. Admittedly, the tone of these evaluations remained generally restrained; on the whole, my students registered their objections with moderation. When tried to probe more deeply into their dissatisfaction, though, by inquiring specifically about their attitudes toward writing, uncovered a much more virulent strain of animosity and anger. One student commented tersely, I feel a 100 pt. essay question is ridiculous, and most of his classmates seemed to agree. An overwhelming majority felt they did better on objective questions than on essay questions, and a similar number reported that they preferred objective questions to essays. Almost half the class even confessed that they had considered not taking one course or another at the university because they knew in advance that they would be expected to do some

Preview this article: A Critical Survey of Resources for Teaching Rhetorical Invention, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/40/6/collegeenglish16062-1.gif

IT IS A TRUISM TO SAY that successful teaching strategies begin with, and build upon, the skills and competencies that students bring with them to class. But it is a useful truism, for it highlights the distance between our methods of teaching arrangement and what our students already know about it-know intuitively, simply as part of their language equipment, part of their being human. Consider, for example, the experiment devised by David G. Hays, a computational linguist: