Archive for the ‘Rhetoric and teaching’ Category
Hiragana
Last night was the second meeting of the “Pedagogies of Reading” seminar. The main event was to be the first two sections of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, but I had too many lead in activities, so we barely got started on that discussion, and it will have to continue on line. Wolf’s book is about how the human brain came to read, an activity for which it was not designed, and has not yet completely evolved to do. Reading is accomplished by kludging together visual and language processing systems in various parts of the brain. There is no reading center in the brain. The complexity of the interactions between systems is such that reading difficulties can be hard to categorize or diagnose.
The writing system trains the brain to read, so part of Wolf’s development of these ideas is a history of writing, from pictographic symbols, to logographic writing with a sign for each word, such as ancient Sumerian, to hybrid systems combining logographic writing with a syllabary or partial alphabet, such as ancient Egyptian or modern Chinese, to fully alphabetic writing such as that developed by the Phoenicians and adopted by the Greeks. I wanted my students to have some “hands-on” familiarity with a writing system different from English. I decided to create an exercise using Japanese hiragana.
Japanese use a hybrid syllabic and logographic system. A syllabary is a set of characters that represent each syllable or consonant/vowel combination possible in the language, unlike an alphabet which represents each possible sound. There are actually two syllabaries in Japanese: hiragana, which is used to represent grammatical relationships between words, which are represented by Chinese characters, and katakana, which is used to represent foreign words. I created a list of Japanese words and phrases including city names such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka and useful phrases such as konnichiwa (Good afternoon) and gomen nasai (I’m sorry) and domo arigato (Thank you).
The city names would normally be represented by Chinese characters or kanji. However, the last time I was in Tokyo I was riding on a subway and I noticed that the electronic sign announcing the upcoming station was scrolling the names in romanji, which is is Roman letters as English uses, kanji, and then hiragana. I asked my wife why they were using hiragana. She said it was for school children who had not yet learned either kanji or English. I found this eminently sensible, and the it has the added advantage of turning the subway into a kind of Rosetta Stone for leaning kanji. Anyway, there is precedent for using hiragana in this way.
However, when I started to transliterate my list into hiragana, I found that the system was not quite as simple as I had thought. I had several hiragana charts, including a couple that provided unicode in hexidecimal that allowed me to produce the characters in Word. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know how to produce the character for “kyo.” It turns out that you use “ki” plus a small “yo.” I found out sort of accidentally that the “wa” at the end of “konnichiwa” should actually be spelled “ha” because originally it was part of a sentence, and when “wa” is used as a particle, it is spelled “ha” even though it is pronounced “wa.”
Just as I was becoming very insecure about my exercise, a student knocked on my door wanting to talk about an essay. One of the writing center tutors had given her contradictory advice, and she wanted a second opinion. As I resolved that problem, I noticed that she had a Japanese name. I asked here if she spoke and read Japanese. She started to apologize for speaking too much Japanese and not learning English. I said, “Wait, can you help me with something?” It turned out that she was a former grammar school teacher and was very familiar with teaching hiragana to small children. She took out a red pen and corrected my work very professionally. She said that I had made all the mistakes that the kids make, but she was surprised that I had spelled “konnichiwa” correctly because many Japanese get it wrong. I probably would have gotten a “B-”.
Most of my mistakes involved long vowels. “Tokyo,” for example should actually be romanized as “Toukyou,” including the “u” character that is not really pronounced. I decided that revising my spelling in most cases would make the exercise too difficult for my students, so I left it as it was. My purpose was to have them work with new symbols and get a feel for how a syllabary worked, not to teach them to read Japanese.
I handed out a hiragana chart from Wikipedia at the start of class, telling them that there would be a quiz on it. They laughed. I think I have lost the ability to frighten them. After another activity, I gave them the list of words, with the hiragana spellings mixed up. They had to draw a line from the English spelling to the corresponding hiragana version. They treated it like a sudoku puzzle, and they had fun with it. One student had spent time in Japan, so he did it really quickly.
Somehow, they accepted this grammar school exercise as a reasonable thing to do in a graduate seminar. They are probably still taking about it.
Teaching Online
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: hybrid course, literacy, Pedagogy
Leave a Comment My “Pedagogies of Reading” seminar this quarter is scheduled to meet on Tuesdays from 5:30-9:20. I have never found four-hour evening seminars to be productive, either as a teacher or a student. By the time we begin, I have been running a Writing Center all day, and many of my students have spent the day teaching high school, working elsewhere, or taking care of families. By about 8:00 we are all flagging. So I end the in-class session at 8:00 and move about half of the work online to the Blackboard site.
Blackboard is an online course management system. On my campus a Blackboard site is created for every course , whether the instructor uses it or not. It provides announcements, discussion boards, places to upload and download documents, quizzes, systems to manage grades and statistics, and other features. It is easy to use, but doesn’t do everything I would like, and has maddening glitches. The discussion board is especially clunky. Last year, my honors science fiction class got so fed up with it that they created an alternative discussion board on a free site. But that’s another post.
My grad students, being older and less technologically savvy, get along with the Blackboard discussion board without complaint.
The first task my students had to do was answer the question, “What kind of reader are you?” I modeled this for them by describing my own reading habits and inclinations over the years, in part because they needed a model, and in part because I was asking them to present somewhat personal information in a semi-public forum, and in fairness, I thought I should reveal something of myself as well. Because they are graduate students in English, it is not surprising that most of them describe lots of books in the home, parents who were readers and who read to them, voracious reading of adolescent literature, and early attraction to more sophisticated literary texts. However, not all came from environments like this. One immigrant student describes a home in which the parents worked hard but read nothing, and credits her success as a reader to one teacher who tried to compensate for what was lacking in her home environment.
Of course, that is exactly the question. Can teachers and good pedagogy make a difference?
The second task was to go to the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) website, create an account, download one first semester module, read the discussion board for that module to get an idea of what teachers were thinking about, and then post a response on our Blackboard discussion board. The ERWC is a twelfth grade course designed by a task force that I chaired. We were charged to create a course that would prepare high school students to do college-level reading and writing. About half of CSU students systemwide test into so-called “remedial” English courses, and the ERWC is an attempt to remedy that situation. The task force consisted of both CSU and high school faculty. The course is now taught in hundreds of high schools, and thousands of teachers have been trained to teach it.
So far, this assignment is working well. My students are already connecting their own experiences as readers with the pedagogy of the ERWC modules, and plugging in ideas from the first book we are reading Proust and the Squid. The non-teachers see the modules differently from the teachers. For example, one of the modules deals with fast food and discusses the connection between super-sized portions and obesity. The non-teachers were worried that overweight students in the class might be offended by the discussion and be picked on by others. The experienced teachers said that if bullying was going to happen, it was already going on, and that high school students need opportunities to discuss controversial issue that have meaning in their lives. Very interesting.
Two students out of eighteen have not participated online. I will have to treat that as an attendance and participation problem, as these two assignments are non-graded. My experience in the past has been that the online discussions will spill over into the in-class session, and that the non-participants will feel left out and correct their behavior.
I feel that the online component adds significant depth and complexity to the course. And I don’t have to teach four hours straight.
Songwriting versus Teaching
Filed under: Music and Guitar, Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: Bob Dylan, kindergarten, literacy
Comments (3) My daughter and I were having a discussion about which changed more lives, songwriting or teaching? Good teaching has a pyramid-like effect, especially if you teach prospective teachers. Your students go out and teach others, who may end up teachers themselves and teach others. Sometimes you can see the effect almost immediately. Once I was teaching a course called “Writing in the Schools.” The students were all pre-service teachers, but some were going to teach grammar school, some high school, some college. I was teaching a book by Jerome Harste called Language Stories, Literacy Lessons, which is a longitudinal study of pre-school literacy. Harste and his team found that pre-school kids engage in all sorts of pre-literate behavior. They know that writing is different from drawing and they can recognize a McDonald’s from way down the street because they can read the logo. They often can recognize and name some letters in the alphabet, and they are often excited about literacy. However, when they get to kindergarten, teachers usually ignore all these abilities and make them begin writing carefully-shaped letters exactly between the lines. One student described in the Harste book went into Kindergarten saying “I can write!” and after the first week said “I can’t write.”
A student who was working as a teacher’s aid in a kindergarten class added my class late, so she missed the first lecture. As I signed her add form, she said, “My students can’t do anything. They can’t read or write, or follow simple instructions.” The next week, after she had read about half of the Harste book, she said, “My students are doing all of these things, but their teacher won’t accept it. She tells them to fill out something with a green crayon, and they use all different colors, so they fail.”
That teacher is undoubtedly in a classroom somewhere today, and it is likely that her kindergarten students are writing and reading much better than others because she is working with natural pre-literate behaviors instead of against them. Good teaching has a magnifying, multiplying effect.
Most pop music is entertaining fluff. It’s a pleasure, but it doesn’t have much substance or ideological content. When I first started listening to L.A. rock radio, KRLA and KFWB, the number one song was “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher. There is not much to think about in songs like that. “Yesterday” by the Beatles was popular. It has a pretty melody and a lot of pathos, but there is not much for the mind. The first song that had a profound impact on me on multiple levels was Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Imagine hearing “I Got You Babe” followed by this:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didnt you?
Peopled call, say, beware doll, youre bound to fall
You thought they were all kiddin you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin out
Now you dont talk so loud
Now you dont seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.
To a seventh grader listening to pop music, that sounds real. It sounds wise and experienced. It’s a gritty fairy tale with a moral point. Don’t get too smug or comfortable, don’t be high and mighty, because you might fall. I heard it then, and I still hear it now.
Dylan had a talent for distilling a lot of experience into one line. The first line of “Queen Jane Approximately” goes:
When your mother sends back all your invitations
That line triggers a sense of weariness and alienation so complete it almost brings tears. Every verse describes a new way for things to go completely wrong. I was at a rock club one night listening to a group play African-influenced rock, when without warning they launched into this. I knew what it was from the first chords, and somehow, striking without warning like that with no context, it was even more powerful.
So which one wins, songwriting or teaching? Well, we didn’t resolve the debate, which will continue.
First Meeting
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: Graduate Seminar, Pedagogy, rhetoric
Leave a Comment The first meeting of “Pedagogies of Reading” went well, at least in my view. No one complained about the reading load, all the assignments were accepted without groaning or moaning, and students participated in discussions with some engagement and enthusiasm. These days, graduate students are a tough audience. I taught my first seminar at this campus in 2003. I was teaching some difficult books: James Crosswhite’s, Rhetoric of Reason, The Bakhtin Reader, and Glen Stillar’s The Rhetoric of Everyday Texts which I am teaching again this quarter. Of the Crosswhite book, one student said, “Reading this book was like having hot wires stuck in my eyes. This is an English course, not a philosophy course. Why are we reading this?” I was stunned. When I was a grad student, no one would have thought of raising his or her hand and announcing that the text was incomprehensible. We were all trying to be cool and intellectually serene, even if we had no idea what the book was about.
This particular student actually emailed Crosswhite for help. He was puzzled, to say the least. However, when she took the comprehensive exams she told me that she had used Crosswhite in one of her answers. She was smart enough to get it and use it. The problem was that she was used to being smart and getting it the first time around. She was not used to struggling with a difficult book, even a book that was worth the struggle.
In a ten-week quarter, it is often the case that the material doesn’t come into real focus for the student until a month after the course has ended, long after evaluations and grades are over. My response to this problem has been to continue assigning difficult books, but also providing reading questions, hands on activities, group discussions, even quizzes, all in a graduate seminar. It is not like any seminar I ever took, but they learn and use more concepts, and my evaluations are higher.
They do use the concepts. When I go to our annual “Graduate Symposium,” where students present the best papers submitted during the year, I hear students using terminology and analytical concepts from my courses in papers for other courses. That’s nice.
At this first seminar meeting, after going over the syllabus, I gave them James Gee’s “What is Literacy?” and showed a powerpoint that summarized the main concepts in the article. Gee calls the language we acquire and use in the family the “primary” discourse. All discourses we use in institutions outside the family are “secondary” discourses. He invokes Krashen’s distinction between conscious learning and unconscious acquisition. He notes that acquisition is necessary for mastery, but that learning is necessary for metalinguistic critique and analysis. The closer a student’s primary discourse is to the secondary discourse he or she is acquiring, the easier things will go. He points out that many non-mainstream students in the classroom are using the teacher’s speech to acquire the the teacher’s discourse, not to learn the content.
After this presentation we had small group discussions on two questions: 1) Does Gee’s analysis fit your own classroom experience, and 2) If Gee is right, what should happen in the classroom?
After these discussions, in preparation for Proust and the Squid, I gave them two pages from Feersom Endjiin by Iain M. Banks. This section is written phonetically with some features that look like text messaging, and the narrator is a young man who lives in a monastery and has a pet ant who can talk. It is a difficult text on first reading. I asked them to read quickly and make a mark in the text whenever their reading was disrupted in some way. This worked, but I had to admit that their first readings were more successful tham mine. Because they were more familiar with text messaging, they quickly figured out the rules of this writing, and read with a fair amount of ease. One student said that in text messaging, you think in concepts, not words. If true, that could mean that at least one form of English is moving away from alphabetic literacy back to a logographic system like Chinese. Very interesting.
New Course
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: literacy, seminar, teaching reading
Leave a Comment For me it’s a new year, a new quarter, and a new course. I spent much of the break designing a graduate seminar I haven’t taught before, “Pedagogies of Reading.” These days the campus bookstore insists that you order the books months in advance, so with a new course you often have to order books without a chance to think deeply about how they will fit together. You look at the tried and true, get recommendations from colleagues, search through new offerings, and ultimately go with your instincts. Now you have a pile of relevant books for your students to read. How do you chart a course through them?
Now that I have worked through the plan I think my process worked and my instincts were on target. This course is going to work.
My 17 students are in three options: Rhetoric and Composition, Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and Literature. They have different interests and backgrounds, but I know about half of them from previous seminars. I know that they will need guidance on what to attend to in the readings, practice with analytical tools and concepts, texts with interesting features to analyze, and activities to help them think about applying theory to teaching. My goal is this course is to enable students to evaluate reading pedagogy at all levels from a theoretical perspective, and to design new curriculum that is both coherent and effective.
I decided to start with Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolfe. Wolfe is a neurologist, but this is a popular book that focuses on “the reading brain.” Wolfe points out that the human brain is not designed to read, and that reading as an activity integrates a number of cognitive and perceptual systems that evolved for other purposes. In discussing these issues, she gives us a history of writing systems from pictographic to logographic to syllabaries and alphabets, and describes the cognitive demands of the various writing systems and the pedagogies used to teach them. This is a wide-ranging and fascinating book. It opens up for reflection and inspection many things that we take for granted.
Next we will read James Gee’s Social Linguistics and Literacies. This book is an introduction to discourse analysis and what Gee calls “New Literacy Studies.” Discourse analysis will provide important analytical tools, and although Wolf’s perspective is neurological at heart, she acknowledges the social basis of much linguistic behavior, so these two books complement each other. Another connection between them is that both offer different readings of Plato’s Phaedrus, an important text in the history of literacy. Many of my students have read the Phaedrus thoroughly and will probably disagree with both Wolf and Gee. That will prove interesting.
From there we will move on to Reading Rhetorically by Bean, Chappell, and Gillam. This is actually a textbook for a freshman course, but we use it in the 12th grade Expository Reading and Writing course (ERWC) that we developed for California State University as a teacher resource. The book is full of highly usable but sophisticated reading strategies. My seminar students will use their newly won understanding of reading theory to evaluate the pedagogies deployed in Reading Rhetorically and the ERWC curriculum.
From there we move on to a more difficult book. Glen Stillar’s Analyzing Everyday Texts also teaches discourse analysis, but his method combines a linguistic approach derived from M. A. K, Halliday, a rhetorical approach modeled on Kenneth Burke, and a social perspective influenced by Pierre Bourdieu. I think they will be ready for this, but we will spend two weeks on it. The key, I think, is to present the right examples for them to analyze, and to walk them through some of it.
At this point, in part to engage the literature majors, we will explore pedagogies of teaching literature, using Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, The Text, The Poem and Jane Tompkins’ collection, Reader-Response Criticism. Both of these books are part of movement away from treating the text as an objective source of meaning, locating meaning instead in the transaction between the text and the reader. The discussions should be interesting.
Designing a seminar is an interesting and exciting activity. It should have an arc, a beginning a middle and an end. You have goals and plans, and you follow them or change them on the fly as reality intervenes. It can be an intellectual roller coaster of your own design. I am looking forward to seeing if the plan works.
Sophistic Rhetoric and “Little Pink Houses”
Filed under: Music and Guitar, Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: McCain, Mellencamp, Reagan, sophist, Springsteen
Comments (1) I guess I should attempt to make a bridge between “guitar” and “sophist.”
In “Encomium of Helen” the sophist Gorgias defends Helen of Troy, widely considered to be the epitome of a bad woman. Gorgias argues that she is blameless because her actions were either due to the will of the gods, or she was “by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed.” Gorgias’ argument deprives Helen of all agency and thus all moral responsibility. However, what I am interested in here is not the argument, but the theory of rhetoric represented here by the seductive power of words. Gorgias argues
Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity. I shall show how this is the case, since it is necessary to offer proof to the opinion of my hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. But come, I shall turn from one argument to another. Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft.
Much of the effect of Gorgias’ speech derives from rhythmic, poetic language with odd turns of phrase and lots of repetition of words and sounds. The translator of the above passage has attempted to preserve a bit of this effect. This is the sophistic logos, a persuasion through hypnotizing words rather than logical argument, as in Aristotle. Note especially the last sentence above, where he talks about the particular power of words that are sung to beguile and persuade the soul.
I want to argue that rock n’ roll music is the inheritor of the Gorgianic strand of sophistic rhetoric. Let me see if I can make this case.
In 1984 (1984, yikes, how Orwellian!) Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign tried to use Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a campaign theme. The chorus sounds stirringly patriotic:
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
It is almost impossible to hear this chorus without singing along, even for people who were not born in the U.S.A. However, the words themselves are banal and repetitive. It’s the music, the rhythm, the chords, and the arrangement, that drives them into your skull. You can hear this song a hundred times and not hear any lyrics besides these. That is what fooled the Reagan campaign. If you listen more carefully you hear words like these:
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
The song is clearly a bitter message about the men who went to fight in Vietnam and the problems they had when they returned home. The Reagan campaign’s cluelessness about this is old news. People, including Springsteen, said that they needed to put in the time and effort to listen to the song. However, songs with a rousing chorus like this are not designed to be understood in one take. What is the rhetorical effect of living with a song for a period of time, liking it, hearing it as a celebration of patriotism and American values, taking it into your heart and consciousness, and then suddenly hearing it as a critique? Could it be that a message that would have been fended off by ideological filters actually gets a hearing?
The McCain campaign recently made a similar blunder with John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” The chorus is equally patriotic and stirring, except that the last line contains a hint of possible irony:
Oh, but ain’t that America
For you and me
Ain’t that America
Something to see, baby
Ain’t that America
Home of the free, yeah
Little pink houses
For you and me
Oooh, little baby
For you and me
The verses are about ordinary people, their aspirations and disappointments. There’s a black man in a black neighborhood with an interstate running through his front yard who “thinks that he’s got it so good.” There’s a greasy young man in a t-shirt who already thinks he’s found his destination because his crazy dreams to be president, “just kind of came and went.” But the real problem for the McCain campaign might be this verse:
Well, there’s people and more people
What do they know, know, know
Go to work in some high rise
And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico
Ooh, yeah
And there’s winners and there’s losers
But they ain’t no big deal
‘Cause the simple man, baby
Pays for thrills
The bills the pills that kill
Each verse builds up the irony of the “Ain’t that America” of the chorus until the catch phrase signifies a sense of broken dreams and quiet desperation rather than celebratory pride.
Neither “Born in the U.S.A.” nor “Pink Houses” is anti-American. Both songs question American culture and politics in constructive and provocative ways. However, neither song is exactly what it appears to be on first listening. The music opens the way for the bewitchment that is to come. Gorgias would approve.
What is a Sophist?
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: rhetoric, sophist, teaching
Leave a Comment The sophists were in a sense traveling professors of rhetoric and other arts. Most of what we know about them comes from Plato in dialogues like the Gorgias and the Protagoras. Susan Jarratt, in Re-reading the Sophists, argues that Plato and Aristotle conducted what amounts to a smear campaign against the sophists, leaving us with a generally negative view. Plato’s problem was that sophistic rhetoric persuaded to belief rather than true knowledge. Aristotle did not like the fact that sophists, particularly Protagoras, tended to practice arguing both sides of the question, and to appeal to emotion rather than logic. However, Plato and Aristotle were authoritarian conservatives. Plato thought that we should be ruled by a philosopher king, with each citizen fulfilling his or her role in the social hierarchy, and Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great at the court of Phillip of Macedon. The sophists, on the other hand, taught that any citizen could become a leader, if he studied rhetoric with the sophist. Jarratt argues that the sophists are more democratic and egalitarian than either Plato or Aristotle, and thus more in tune with our own time.
Because most sophists traveled from city to city in a time when the cultural practices in one city could be very different from another, they were very sensitive to local customs and traditions, in part as a matter of survival. The Greek term for local “custom-law” is nomos. In general, the sophists did not believe in universal truths, focusing instead on what is persuasive in the here and now, in this place, at this moment. This concern for the moment is called kairos. Sensitivity to nomos and kairos puts the sophists quite at odds with Plato’s focus on metaphysical ideal forms and Aristotle’s focus on logic.
Another criticism of the sophists is that they taught for money. Isocrates, who probably should be considered a sophist himself, asks of the sophists “If the wisdom you teach is so priceless, why do you only charge a few coins?” Isocrates charged a lot. Socrates is always pressing sophists on the question of whether virtue can be taught, and because most sophists tend to say that it can, there are many jokes about sophists who demand that their students pay up front. The argument goes, “If you succeed in teaching virtue your students will pay; if they don’t pay, your teaching was unsuccessful anyway.”
I would argue that whether we think we are Platonists or Aristotelians or whatever, all English professors are in fact sophists by definition, because we claim that our instruction will cause our students to speak and write more effectively and to become better people, and we take money for it. However, I think we should wear this label proudly. To be a sophist is a worthy profession, Plato and Aristotle notwithstanding.
