Kyoto and Nara
Our time in Yokohama went well. We are now in Kyoto, and the Granvia Hotel, which is actually part of Kyoto Station. Here is the view from our window:
The shinkansen (bullet train) tracks are right below us. We hear trains all night, but the sound is muffled, so it is actually pleasant. My daughter’s Japanese is improving, but still not up to complex negotiations, so when we came down here from Yokohama on the shinkansen, she accidentally bought the most expensive tickets possible, reserved seats on a nozomi super-express. The nozomi is the newest, fastest train with a long shovel-like nose. We arrived in Kyoto in a little over two hours, after enjoying boxed lunches we bought in Shin-Yokohama Station.
Trains are an integral part of Japanese culture. In Los Angeles we build slow trains to nowhere and wonder why people don’t ride them. In Japan, life revolves around train stations, which contain shops, department stores, and most necessities of life. The trains are fast, reliable, and easy to use. One does not need a car for most purposes.
Yesterday we took a train to Kamo Station in Nara, and then a bus up to Gansenji Temple. I wanted to revisit a hiking course that my wife and I had taken 22 years ago, from Gansenji to Joruriji Temple. Along the way there are a large number of images of Buddha carved into various boulders. We bought some mochi (pounded rice with red bean paste inside) from a lady at Gansenji, who could have easily been the same lady who sold rice balls to my wife and me on the earlier trip. When my wife and I had come, it was a cold, drizzling winter day. This time in the spring the landscape was lush and green, the sky was blue, and birds were everywhere. Some things were the same, and some had changed. The trail was well marked, at least if you could read hiragana, and we made it to Joruriji in good time. Here is a picture of Joruriji:
There are nine images of Buddha in this small temple. After visiting Joruriji, we happened upon a bus that was going back to Kamo Station, so we had time to go to Nara Deer Park and Todaiji Temple as well. The deer wander freely among the temples, and bow to passersby to beg for food. Visitors can buy deer food from carts, but if you have other snacks, such as a roasted sweet potato, the deer can become annoyingly persistent. Here is a typical resident of the Deer Park:
Today we will move to Otsu, near Lake Biwa. Our family says that it will be boring, but we are hoping that that means relaxing.
Japan: First Day
My daughter and I are at the Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku. When one flies to Tokyo, one actually lands in Narita, about 90 minutes away from Tokyo by bus. As usual for our first day when we come to Japan, we are up at 4:00 am. Jet lag is a mysterious but predictable phenomenon. For this reason, we like to take the airport limousine to a nice hotel for the first night before we move on to Yokohama to visit family.
Japan seems to be very focused on the dangers of swine flu. When we landed, we had to wait for about 20 minutes while a team of masked quarantine officers in disposable coveralls checked everyone for symptoms. You were supposed to raise your hand if you felt sick. Every passenger had to fill out a form about where they had been, where they were going, and what symptoms they had or didn’t have. There was even a device set up that was supposed to monitor your temperature as you went through the line. The hotel made us fill out more forms about our health. I don’t really see how this could help.
When we first started coming to Japan 22 years ago, we would wake up before the rest of the household and walk to the Denny’s in Honomoku. This Denny’s is better than any Denny’s in the U.S. We started going there because we needed coffee, and Denny’s has coffee refills, what they call “Another Cup” service. The restaurant has parking underneath, like many in Japan, so it is above the hustle and bustle of the street, and is in fact, an oasis of American serenity (perhaps a contradiction in terms, I know). Both American-style and Japanese-style food is available, and I have never been disappointed in either. For some reason, they always have excellent papaya.
Since our first-day routine has shifted to Shinjuku we have other favorites. Last night we ate at a noodle shop with handmade udon (a thick noodle) about two blocks from the hotel. My wife and daughter had eaten there last time they were here. The food was excellent and reasonable. I don’t know the name of the restaurant, however, because there was no Romanji, only Japanese. I had kitsune udon, which has fried tofu on top.
(Actually, we went by this morning. It was closed, but the steel door said “Udon Sangokuichi”)
Today we will look for a sandwich and coffee shop in Shinjuku Station my wife and I visited last time we were here together. And then we will be on to Yokohama, perhaps after visiting Meiji Jingu shrine.
Note: We found the sandwich shop, which is called “Natural Beat Eat Cafe.” Here’s a picture:
Breath, Grammar, and Proper Punctuation
Today’s post is a reworking of a newsletter article I wrote several years ago.
In the Writing Center we field a lot of questions about punctuation, and we see a lot of punctuation problems. Most writers, even professional writers, feel uncertain about proper punctuation on occasion. We expect punctuation to be governed by rules, but taste, style, and even breathing patterns also have influence.
Punctuation practice is rooted in oral language. Oral face-to-face speech is a multimodal, multichannel event that encodes a lot of redundant information. In addition to speaking words embedded in grammatical structures, we vary the intensity of our speech; we pause for effect; we modulate the intonation, making the voice rise and fall; and we use physical gestures, body language and facial expressions.
In a telephone conversation we are no longer in a face-to-face situation, and we lose the visual channels. Generally, we compensate well by attending more closely to words, intonation and syntax and the design of the telephone tends to help us focus on these things.
A Significant Disadvantage
However, in a speakerphone conference in which some of the participants are physically present to one another while another only has access to aural information, the latter party may feel that he or she is at a significant disadvantage. And when the two parties to a telephone conversation have different cultural backgrounds, or when one party doesn’t speak the language of the conversation well, we feel the need of information from the missing channels to confirm our interpretations.
When we write, we lose all visual and auditory channels, leaving only words and grammatical structures to carry the message. Rather than a broad array of redundant channels to rely on, when we write, we have only two. Or perhaps I should say two and a quarter, because we also have punctuation.
Bringing Back Intonation
The punctuation system is designed to bring back into writing some of the information encoded in pauses and intonation. As a substitute for the living voice, it is a pale shadow only. Instead of shouting and shaking a fist, we have the exclamation point. Instead of a conspiratorial whisper we have . . . well, we don’t have anything, because there is no mark for whispering. In fact, there are many common devices of speech that have no equivalent in the punctuation system. What marks we do have—commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, question marks and the rest—are generally seen to indicate pauses of varying lengths and are historically associated with the breath. However, they are also associated with the grammatical structures, and thus there are grammatical rules for their use.
Contradictory Conceptions
These two conceptions of punctuation—to indicate pauses for breathing and for rhetorical effect, and to delineate the grammatical boundaries of the text—are to a certain extent contradictory, opposing the creative, living, breathing, individual voice with an analytical, logical, rule-driven structure. These conceptions co-exist in our society, making punctuation both difficult to teach and confusing to learn.
The earliest work on punctuation in English is the anonymous Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, published in London in 1680. The theory of punctuation presented in this work is based entirely on breathing and rhetorical pauses. Clearly designed for classroom use, it contains the following verses for easy memorization:
A comma is a breathing stop: no more,
Stop at it while you may tell one, therefore.
Where semi-colon placed is; there you,
May please to make a stop, while you tell two.
A colon is a longer stop; therefore,
Stop at each colon, while you may tell four.
The author of the Treatise is also aware of the intonation patterns implied by certain punctuation marks, as is illustrated by the following couplet on the question mark:
When e’re a question you shall propound,
An interrogation’s made: but raise the sound.
Indeed, the Treatise is valued by linguists today more for what it says about the pronunciation and intonation of seventeenth-century English than for the author’s insights into the use of punctuation marks (and certainly not for the author’s poetic ability!). Still, it is a good example of the relationship between breath and punctuation in the historical tradition.
Modern authors are likely to attempt a compromise between the two views. G.V. Carey, author of Mind the Stop: A Brief Guide to Punctuation, writes: “I should define punctuation as being governed two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste. I shall endeavor not to stress the former to the exclusion of the latter, but I will not knuckle under to those who apparently claim for themselves complete freedom to do what they please in the matter.” Carey’s position is probably an accurate statement of the case, but we might ask, “What kind of rule applies only two thirds of the time?”
The Harbrace Handbook
Even the Harbrace Handbook hedges its position on the comma: “The use of the comma depends primarily on the structure of the sentence and signals a small interruption. Inflexible rules governing the use of the comma are few, but there are several basic principles.” So far, so good.
The Harbrace then lists four principles, stating that commas: a) precede coordinating conjunctions when they link main clauses; b) follow introductory adverb clauses and, usually, introductory phrases; c) separate items in a series (including coordinate adjectives); and d) set off nonrestrictive and other parenthetical elements.
A Morass of Jargon
For the average handbook consulter, in the move from the general statement to the basic principles the Harbrace has leapt from cogent wisdom into a morass of grammatical jargon. The four principles are constructed almost entirely of complex grammatical terminology, and one gets the feeling that those who understand this terminology probably already know how to use a comma.
For the reader with a little more understanding, the principles appear to contradict one another. For example, “a” says that commas precede coordinating conjunctions, while “b” puts a comma after a conjunction (which is not, in fact, “coordinating” in this instance). Similarly “c” contains a parenthetical element (set off with parentheses) while “d” says that commas will be used to set off parenthetical elements.
There is nothing incorrect here, just potential confusion. The Harbrace comma principles conform to the condition known in technical writing as C.O.I.K: Clear Only If Known.
The Handbooks are Wrong
John Dawkins, writing in a recent issue of College Composition and Communication, advises us to disregard handbook advice on punctuation anyway. In “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool” he says, “Manuals of style and college handbooks have it all wrong when it comes to punctuation (good writers don’t punctuate that way).” He proposes that there is “a system underlying what good writers, in fact, do; it is a surprisingly simple system; it is a system that enables writers to achieve important—even subtle—rhetorical effects; it is, even, a system that teachers can teach far more easily than they can teach the poorly systematized rules in our handbooks and style manuals” (CCC December 1995 533). Let us hope that Dawkins’ system is simpler than the punctuation he uses in that last sentence.
A Simple System
As it turns out, Dawkins does have a fairly simple and logical system. He points out that “all discourse, written or spoken, consists of independent clauses or underlying independent clauses.” What Dawkins calls “underlying” independent clauses are clauses that would be sentences on their own were it not for a subordinating word, such as “although” or “because,” or missing elements that make it necessary for the clause to be attached to a main clause, which could stand by itself. Dawkins sees the various punctuation marks as encoding different degrees of separation between independent clauses, or between elements in independent clauses. This perspective is different from either the breath-related or the grammatical perspectives already discussed, in that it is based on the writer’s perception of the conceptual relationships.
Three Patterns
Dawkins argues that independent clauses either have extra words, phrases or clauses attached to them, or they don’t. If they do, there are three patterns: the attachment can come at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. In each pattern, the question for the writer is “Do I punctuate, or don’t I?” If punctuation is used, it is chosen on the basis of the degree of separation or connection the writer wishes the ideas to have, or in other words, the “meaning and intended emphasis.”
Three Possibilities
Dawkins articulates three rules for the three possibilities listed above. If the attachment comes at the beginning, only zero, comma, dash, or colon are permissible. If the attachment is at the end, all functional marks are permissible. If the attachment comes in the middle, only paired marks (commas, dashes, zeros, and parentheses) are possible. In this case, with the added material in the middle, the choice boils down to “two marks or none.”
Dawkins then introduces the concept of raising or lowering. By “raising” he means using a mark that is higher in the hierarchy than would normally be used. Here is a sentence with a single independent clause and material added at the end. The basic marks are zero or comma:
1) Gerald promised to write the paper when he had the time.
2) Gerald promised to write the paper, when he had the time.
Example 2 gains more emphasis for the attachment. The higher up in the hierarchy you go, the greater the separation, and the greater the emphasis for the added materials. Thus:
3) Gerald promised to write the paper—when he had the time.
4) Gerald promised to write the paper. When he had the time.
The likelihood of Gerald actually writing the paper diminishes, and the irony of the tone increases, as the punctuation marks get stronger. This is Dawkins’ main point—that good writers use punctuation not to indicate breathing points, not to satisfy grammatical rules, but to create rhetorical effects. Example four creates a sentence fragment, violating a basic handbook rule that is often violated by published writers. Dawkins’ system explains why this rule is so often broken.
It should be said, however, that novelists and short story writers are much more likely to punctuate in the manner Dawkins describes than writers of business correspondence or scientific reports. There is insufficient space to summarize Dawkins’ whole article here. However, perhaps it is enough to know that punctuation cannot be reduced to rules of breath, counting, or grammar, and that there are good reasons to be confused about it.
Folding Bicycles
This post probably won’t have anything to do with rhetoric, teaching or music, unless I find some torturous route to relevance, but it is what I am thinking about this morning.
Due to the need for an enhanced exercise regimen, and some changes in my personal life, I recently acquired a couple of folding bicycles (see pictures near the end of this post). I used to ride quite a bit when I was younger. I had an old Schwinn ten-speed that I rode to high school. I had that painted and fixed up and I rode it later when I was teaching at Cal State L.A. Then I got serious about biking for a while and I got a 12-speed Nishiki that I used for transportation. After a while I decided that the frame on the Nishiki was a little big for me, and I traded it to my brother for his Peugeot. However, the Peugeot sat unused for quite a while, and I finally got rid of it. I hadn’t had a bike for years when I got the folders.
Using bikes for transportation in the L.A. area is nerve-wracking. Even if you plan your route well, you are going to deal with traffic and parked cars. You have to be ever vigilant against the motorist who is going to open the driver-side door of a parked car right in front of you. If this happens just as a supermarket truck is passing you, as happened to me, you are in deep trouble. The truck missed me by an inch or so. I stopped riding in traffic.
Once I took the Nishiki on a bicycle wine tasting tour with a friend from high school. We started from Santa Rosa, north on Old Redwood Highway, which had been the main road before U.S. Route 101 went in. There was almost no traffic on the road, so the ride was peaceful, yet exhilarating, at least at first. I forget the first winery we stopped at, but it had a beautiful approach, a long driveway lined with trees. We were the only tasters there, and we were greeted by a young woman of blond, ethereal beauty. Smitten, I bought two bottles of Gewurztraminer, forgetting for the moment that we were on bicycles. I had panniers (saddle bags) on the rear rack of the bike, so a bottle went on either side. Now I had to carry the wine all the way to Healdsburg and back, about 30 miles round trip. It was idiotic.
My friend wanted to see a former girlfriend in Healdsburg, so that was our destination. He had done theater work at Santa Rosa Junior College, so later that evening we were to see a production of Dracula. All in all a full day.
When we got to Healdsburg, it turned out that the girlfriend was off on a camping trip with another guy. This disturbed my friend more than I had anticipated, and he simply jumped on his bike and began pedaling furiously on the way back to Santa Rosa. I followed, but although Old Redwood Highway was free of traffic, it was full of potholes and thorns. My 100 lb. pressure clincher tires were easy to roll, but they weren’t very thorn proof and I soon had a flat. I stopped to change the tire, but my friend, absorbed in his emotions, pedaled off out of sight. By the time he returned, I had changed the tire, but about half way back, I had another flat. This time I didn’t have a spare tube or any more patches, so it was time to walk the bike.
We made it to the play, which was horrible, and the next morning we made repairs. Biking is great fun if you learn from your mistakes. Don’t buy wine at the beginning of the trip. Call ahead to see if your girlfriend still loves you. And if there are likely to be thorns, use tougher tires. I think these days you can get bike tires that contain Kevlar.
Nothing could be done about the laughable production of Dracula.
So why folding bikes? A folding bike can fit into the trunk of a Honda Civic, or the back seat, without disassembly. You can drive to the lovely bike path and enjoy biking without sharing the road with trucks. You can put the bike in a bag and take it on the bus. You can store the bike in a closet, or under the stairs. There are many advantages.
Folding bikes generally have small wheels, either 16 or 20 inches, tall seat posts and tall handlebar posts. Everything is instantly adjustable. Once you figure it out and practice a bit, you can fold or unfold the bike in about 15 seconds. The high end models are very light. Those under $400 or so are generally heavier, but still under 30 lbs. When I started investigating such bikes, among the cheapest were bikes like the Citizen Tokyo for $164. People seem to like those bikes, but they also seem to want to upgrade them. Bromptons are popular, but are custom-made and most cost more than $1,000. Bike Friday makes some models that fit into an airline suitcase that can be converted into a bike trailer. Downtube is another popular bike, with a lower price.
However, the biggest company making folding bikes, and the brand you are most likely to see in a local bike shop, is Dahon. Dahon has many different models with different configurations of equipment. After much investigation, I decided on a Dahon Speed D7, for $389. Then, because my daughter wanted to go biking with me and the reach to the handlebars on the Speed D7 was a bit too far for her, I bought her a Dahon Eco 3 for $339. Here are the two bikes unfolded:
Two Dahon folding bikes
Here’s a picture with the Speed D7 folded:
One bike folded
Dahon makes a bag to put the bikes in when you want to take them in a building or a bus, or store them in the back seat of a car. Here’s the Dahon Speed D7 in a bag:
One bike in a bag
The bag is fairly easy to carry on your shoulder. It is large, and a little heavy, but it looks like a large duffel bad. Most people would not see it as a bicycle.
We have taken these bikes riding at Venice Beach and at Griffith Park. They are great fun. The Venice bike path has signs painted on the path every 50 yards or so that say “Bikes Only.” Of course there are roller bladers, joggers, pedestrians, baby strollers, dog walkers, and spaced out cellphone talkers as well, along with serious cyclists on high-performance racing bikes whizzing by. It’s a zoo. I didn’t see any other folding bikes, but we fit right in. One day we went from Venice almost to Malibu.
The folders are odd-looking bikes, but that is part of the fun. We are still finding new ways to use them. Being out on a bike does tend to get you out of your daily routines. Yesterday in Griffith Park we met a woman who was handing out flyers for her garden club show, so we stopped and bought a geranium. I’d actually never been to a garden show before.
Assessing English
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: outcomes assessment, WASC
Comments (3) I just spent two days at a WASC-sponsored conference on “Teaching and Assessing the English Major.” WASC is our institution’s accrediting agency, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, so we have to listen to what they say. A WASC review is a six-year process culminating in an evaluation of “educational effectiveness” which largely derives from an analysis of the program assessment measures in place throughout the campus. This conference was the first discipline-specific assessment workshop offered by WASC. Clearly they think there is something lacking in the enthusiasm and expertise of English departments for assessment.
We were supposed to send a team with a specific project to work on. However, for the most part the presenters presented to us. When they gave us time to talk at our tables, it was usually for only five minutes, which meant that one person got half way though presenting an issue, and then we were interrupted.
I came to the conference with more enthusiasm for assessment than when I left. Originally, I saw program assessment as a simple, commonsensical endeavor based on four questions:
- What are we trying to do?
- How are we doing it?
- How do we know that we are doing it?
- How can we improve?
The first question is answered with a series of outcome statements about what the department wants its students to be and do when they complete the program. The second is about pedagogy and curriculum. The third is about data gathering and analysis, and the fourth is about applying what was discovered in that analysis to address any gaps or problems that were revealed. Faculty are generally very focused on the content and effectiveness of the courses that they teach. They don’t often think about the cumulative effect of the entire program on the student. An assessment plan that inspires regular conversations about the design of the whole program and its results will improve the coherence of a department markedly. It just makes sense.
The WASC representative at the conference stated that WASC is primarily interested in program assessment, not course assessment, and not assessment of individual instructors. However, much of the material presented at this conference was about course assessment and student self-assessment. One of the handouts was a chart that every instructor at Alverno College is required to fill out for every course, listing the mission statement of the college, the major outcomes, the course outcomes, and the plan for assessing those outcomes in the course. This goes far beyond setting some goals, gathering some data, and discussing it at a yearly retreat. This is putting the plan and the outcomes in the professor’s face on an almost daily basis.
I don’t know for a fact, but they probably put these outcomes on every syllabus too. Words that are simply duplicated everywhere become invisible. As scholars of language, we should know that.
I think it is important to define outcomes and have conversations at the program level, where such conversations do not usually occur, and leave instructors the freedom to teach as they will. If program outcomes become too rigid and ubiquitous, they will become the material of an elegant cage. Higher education used to be a refuge for brilliant eccentrics. If we drive them all away we will have an institution of competent drones.
I can imagine a future in which universities create a non-assessment college in order to attract the best students and faculty.
Our department is fairly well along in developing an assessment plan. We have nine outcomes, with rubrics for four of them, and a capstone course that helps students develop a portfolio of their work over their career in the program. They collect papers from previous courses, write a new critical paper, and write a reflective essay about how they have grown in the program. We also do an exit interview. We have been assessing two outcomes a year, and developing one new rubric per year. This year the new one is “Research Skills.”
I do think that English departments must change to survive. People forget that English departments are only about 100 years old. What can appear, can disappear. The traditional program covers literature, as they say, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, divided into historical periods, sometimes with genre and major author courses. Faculty specialize in specific periods and authors. That coverage model is severely threatened now because departments are so understaffed. Professors are routinely asked to work up courses outside of their specialties. The coverage is thinner, and the quality less.
However, is coverage of traditional periods, genres, and canonical authors really what English majors need to have? Most departments also include practical disciplines such as linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. We train language teachers and writing teachers. Faculty in all disciplines agree that students should speak and write English well. In fact, they think that is what English departments do, the primary purpose. Perhaps they are right.
Our nine current outcomes are heavily weighted toward coverage of period and genre knowledge. However, when we designed the capstone course, we realized that there would be gaps in coverage, so we focused on interpretive strategies. The current instructor for the capstone assigns works by Italo Calvino which the students have never read before, and asks them to use what they have learned from the program to interpret these texts and write about them. I think we are on to something here. We are assessing the intellectual tool kit that our students have acquired from the program, and their ability to use these tools to analyze new texts.
Focusing on interpretive strategies instead of coverage is necessary in the reduced circumstances we find ourselves in today. However, I think that these skills are also more marketable for students. Necessity may have pushed us in a productive direction. In order to complete this transition, I think we need to revisit our outcomes statements to reflect this new emphasis.
But let’s leave some room for eccentricity and brilliance and some holes in the elegant cage. We are, after all, the English Department.
What are we teaching when we teach literature?
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: literacy, Pedagogy, reading pedagogy
Leave a Comment This week my seminar has been reading Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, The Text, The Poem. After several weeks of analyzing everyday texts, the literature students in the course were happy to finally get to what they saw at the beginning of the course as the important stuff–analyzing literary texts. However, Rosenblatt’s argument that the poem is a product of a transaction between a reader and a text, and that a new unique poem is created by each reader and each reading, took some of them aback. While it is easy to see that a literary text might have multiple meanings, most of us instinctively feel that there must at least be a stable set of “correct” meanings that can be derived from expert, well-informed analysis. From this point of view the student of literature is being trained to provide reliable interpretations within a consensus of opinion.
Rosenblatt sees the text of the poem as being like a musical score to be performed by the reader. Different readers bring different experiences to the performance of the text, so each performance is unique. One could see a literature degree as a way of filling in the background experience so that most literature majors bring a similar body of reading experience to the canonical texts, constraining the types of readings that will occur.
Rosenblatt makes a distinction between aesthetic and efferent reading, the latter being reading for information. In her view, one reads a poem for an aesthetic experience, but reads a medicine bottle purely for facts. She cites an example of a third grade teacher having her students read a poem about cows, and then asking, “What did you learn about cows from this poem?” The question is wrong because it triggers an efferent reading instead of an aesthetic one.
Reading the Cliff’s Notes version of a novel does not produce an aesthetic reading. The reader is looking for facts about the novel, the characters, the plot, the themes, etc., and is looking to avoid the aesthetic experience, the imaginative work of creating a literary work from the text.
Rosenblatt is rigorously trained in philosophy, and her arguments and methods are steeped in phenomenological approaches. I designed an in-class experiment to explore her theory. I divided my class into four groups and gave each group a poem, face down. The poems were “Introduction to Poetry” and “Consolation” by Billy Collins, “To a French Structuralist” by David Kirby, and “Introduction” by Ann Carson, from her book Plainwater. First I allowed the students to read their assigned poem for only 30 seconds. When they stopped, the had to answer three questions:
- What does this poem seem to be about?
- What connection do you feel between this poem and your own experience?
- What questions does this poem make you ask?
The students wrote quite a bit in response to these questions, even after a 30-second reading. In this part of the activity, I was trying to model the kind of reading one might do flipping through a book of poetry looking for something that might be interesting.
Then I asked them to read the poem for 10 minutes and revisit the questions. Again, they wrote a lot.
Finally, they shared their experiences with the members of their groups. The discussions were lively, and the readings various. There were looks of astonishment when certain interpretations were offered. In general, it seemed to me that literary training may have interfered with more natural readings of the poems. For example, the Kirby poem is about the poet sitting in a park in Paris trying to read Todorov’s Poetics, but distracted by the women in the vicinity who hike their skirts and open their blouses to better enjoy the sun. A number of the readings were based on strained metaphors and almost allegorical interpretations, discounting the possibility that the poet might actually be in a park trying to read a book. But that’s just my reading.
So what are we teaching when we teach literature? Are we trying to open up the possibility of unique aesthetic experiences, an ability to use and enjoy literary texts? Or are we trying to constrain the scope of readings within acceptable limits? I am afraid that far too often, it is the latter case.
The last question in the exercise was: “Is Rosenblatt right? Does each reader create his or her own poem?” I think that the consensus was that Rosenblatt is certainly right. However, the question of how much the reading should be constrained, and by what, remains open.
Stomp Boxes: Magical Tone or Magical Thinking?
A stomp box is a guitar signal processor of some kind, usually built into a small metal box with a footswitch on top. Stomp, and it’s on. Stomp, and it’s off. In the quest for a unique tone, most guitarists go through lots of guitars and amps. At some point, the quest will lead to stomp boxes.
Back when I started playing in the late ’60′s, the only stomp boxes around were fuzztones. Fuzz is created by overdriving a small transistor amplifier circuit into clipping. This creates a fuzzy, buzzy sound, thick and full of harmonic content. Perhaps one of the most glorious examples of early fuzztone use is Sam Andrews’ psychedelic guitar on Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, especially the opening track, “Combination of the Two,” and of course, “Summertime.” Andrews’ tone ranges from gnarly full on assault to chimey, flutey textures (some of the chimier moments are James Gurley, the other guitarist in the band). Big Brother was sometimes sloppy, and not always quite in tune, but their arrangements reflected an unusual blues/classical fusion with loud, loud, passages and quiet transitions. They were underrated, in my view, eclipsed by their very famous lead singer, Janis Joplin.
But why not play clean? Fender amplifiers in the 1950′s and early 60′s, the so called “tweed” and “brown” amps, tended to break up when pushed even a bit. The distortion was very musical and warm, with lots of even-order harmonics. This is a characteristic of tube amplifiers, and it is why tube amps are preferred by most guitar players today, even though they are heavier, less reliable, and more expensive than solid state amps. However, Leo Fender was more oriented toward country music, and he saw the distortion as a problem. The “blackface” amps of the ’60′s, Deluxe Reverbs, Super Reverbs, Twin Reverbs, Bandmasters and Dual Showman, were designed to be cleaner, to have more headroom before they begin to significantly distort. To get a thick, sweet, distorted tone one had to play really loud. The later Silverface models were even worse.
Still, why not play clean? I think guitar players have always been jealous of horn players. Before electric guitars were invented, orchestra guitarists had to play big arch top guitars with really heavy action. They were loud, bright, and hard to play, but the player still had to struggle to be heard. When electrics came in, the guitarist could play lead lines (T-Bone Walker is a pioneer), but the notes didn’t have much sustain. They went “plunk” and decayed. Horns can play long notes, and they are effortlessly loud. In fact, it is harder to play a horn soft.
Distortion and feedback make the guitar sing and sustain. Now the guitarist can play lines like a trumpet player. However, if you are using a clean Fender amp, like the Fender Twin Reverb that Sam Andrews was playing through, you need to turn it up really loud, and it still won’t break up that much. Thus the need for the fuzz. Apparently, like Jimi Hendrix a bit later, Andrews used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face, a discus shaped unit with two controls and a switch, arranged to look like a face.
The only fuzz I ever played through back then was a Jordan Boss Tone, which was not technically a stomp box because it plugged straight into a guitar jack. That meant it couldn’t fit into a Stratocaster, but it fit into the Gibson Melodymakers we tended to use at the time. The most famous use of a Boss Tone was probably by Randy California on the first two Spirit albums. It produces a smooth singing sustain, very different from the harmonic rasp of the Fuzz Face. Cool stuff! But Boss Tones didn’t tend to last too long. They got pulled out of the jack a lot, and the innards tended to stop working after a while.
Nowadays there are many different kinds of stomp boxes. Chorus pedals split the signal in half, delay one half slightly, detune it a bit, and give it a pulse, making a 12 string guitar sort of effect. Andy Summers’ guitar on “Message in a Bottle” is a well-known example. Tremolo and vibrato pedals create volume wavers and pitch wavers electronically. On David Gilmour’s latest solo album there is a cut where a guitar note drifts upward a whole octave, something not possible by bending the string or pulling up the tremelo bar. It turns out he is using a “whammy” pedal, a stomp box capable of such tricks. There are digital and analog delay pedals that produce echo effects. Compressor pedals smooth out the dynamics and increase sustain without distortion. The list is endless.
Of course there are new fuzz boxes too. And overdrive pedals, which make the guitar sound like the amp is on 10 when it is actually at a much lower volume. Very handy, and they can prevent hearing loss.
Pedal types and manufacturers have proliferated. And of course, as with guitars and amps, vintage mystique enters in here too. Early transistors were made of germanium, while today’s are made of silicon, so Jimi’s Fuzz Face had different components than the same unit today, unless it is made to vintage specs. The search for vintage mojo led to boutique builders who recreate vintage effects, or design new, better than vintage units. To buy a Zendrive, an overdrive unit favored by Robben Ford, one has to get on a waiting list and pay $199.
Companies with large-scale Chinese manufacturing capability, such as Danelectro, have allegedly begun to clone some of these boutique offerings and sell them very cheaply. One can also buy kits to build vintage effects, and there are groups that reverse engineer popular effects so that hobbyists can build their own. Some manufacturers put plastic goop on their circuit boards to hide the components and prevent reverse engineering. It’s a crazy business. Crazy, but big.
I recently bought an MXR Dyna Comp, the current version of a famous compressor pedal. It’s a modernized design, with upgraded features, but Dunlop (who bought MXR) has just come out with a reissue of the “script logo” 1976 version, which uses a chip that is no longer made. In the online forums that discuss such things, guitar players are gushing about the wonders of the reissue. They told me that my new pedal, just ordered and on the way, was junk, that it sounded bad. I asked, “What is it that you don’t like about the sound?” They just said it sounds like junk. Well, actually it does just what I wanted. It makes the sound clucky like country, and jangly like Roger McGuin’s Rickenbacker 12 string on “Mr. Tamborine Man.” To me it sounds great. I find that one should not believe a lot of the perceived wisdom on forums. As they say, Your Mileage May Vary.
Why are guitarists obsessed with stomp boxes? Well, imagine that you could step on a switch and change your sound, your personality, your talent, and your image. It is actually only the sound that changes, but it is easy to think that there is more. If I have the same type of Fuzz Face as Jimi Hendrix, or the same Tube Screamer that Stevie Ray Vaughn used, there is a bit of a connection. And I think we’d all like to step on a switch and transform ourselves into something more, louder, bigger, more complex. Step on a switch and . . .Wow!
Wow!
Reading RIAP
“RIAP” stands for “Reading Institute for Academic Preparation.” It is a California State University initiative to improve the teaching of reading in high school. My campus was funded to run an institute this year, so I spent the past two days in Sacramento at a leadership meeting.
The idea is to recruit 20 local high school teachers and give them a year-long seminar in reading theory and practice. We got two three-inch thick binders and four heavy boxes of books. And that was just for us. The materials for the participants come later!
The RIAP institute introduces the participants to the ERWC assignment template and selected modules (see a previous post on the ERWC), shows them how to assess the needs of their students through a “College Access Study,” teaches then how to design their own lesson module based on the assessed needs, and introduces a generous amount of reading theory and class room practice. RIAP teachers are then expected to become leaders on their campuses, helping to introduce new thinking and practices. In our RIAP, we plan to recruit 3+1 teams consisting of one English teacher, one science teacher, one math teacher, and one administrator, although the administrator will not attend every session.
Including content-area teachers is an important feature of our plan. Science and math teachers often don’t recognize that literacy issues are part of the reason that students struggle in their classes, and if they do, they often blame the English teachers. Reading and writing are important aspects of any course, and each discipline has its own stylistic and organizational peculiarities. Science and math teachers need to teach reading and writing too.
In the past, up to third grade was about “learning to read.” Fourth grade and beyond was about “reading to learn.” We now know that we can’t stop teaching reading in the third grade. Our expectations are simply too high.
We are confused, too, by those who take to reading naturally. There is no substitute for the voracious self-directed reading that some of us do at an early age. When I was young, my mother went to the library every week. I always came home with stacks of science and history books, and science fiction novels. Later, I started reading the L.A. Times every morning. Fifty years of books and thirty years of daily newspaper reading lead to a large vocabulary and a lot of general background knowledge about many things.
Would I have become addicted to books and newspapers if YouTube had been available? I don’t know. It is hard to imagine. However, much of the reading instruction we do now is an attempt to bring fluency and comprehension to those who did not acquire it naturally through voracious reading. In fact, most of our students have no appetite for reading at all. Reading is an acquired taste.
At the RIAP leadership meeting there was a presentation by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey, both from San Diego State. Doug talked about brain scan research that suggests that knowledge of vocabulary is associated with memory, not with the language center. An ambiguous word like “bug” lights up different parts of the brain if it is associated with “Volkswagen,” “insect” or “spy device.” This is scientific confirmation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia,” the idea that the words we use resonate with the voices that spoke them to us. The connotation of a word continues to echo the places we heard or read it in, and the contexts in which we found it.
Will a word that came out of a vocabulary list in a classroom, a product of drills and sentence-making exercises in a regimented and coercive environment, ever provide pleasure in a natural setting? Can a teacher’s well-intentioned scaffolding and structuring ever match the joy of words first encountered after bedtime, hiding under the covers with a flashlight? Well, sometimes the joy of reading comes late, and sometimes a teacher can inspire it. But it has to be a special kind of teacher, and that is where RIAP comes in.
Letters to Shareholders
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: discourse analysis
Leave a Comment Last night the seminar looked at Chapter 2 of Glenn Stillar’s Analyzing Everyday Texts in which he lays out a system of discourse analysis based on M.A. K. Halliday’s social semiotics. We actually had a good time.
Last time I taught this book it was pretty much a disaster. This time I did some analysis of my own to figure out why. Stillar’s text is readable at the paragraph level, but because there are lots of terms, and lots of overlap, it is hard to put the whole system together. The subhead styles used by the publisher don’t help much either. I made the students an outline. This helped immensely. And then we worked through lots of examples.
Stillar’s main insight is that texts simultaneously construct worlds, construct relationships between participants in the discourse, and create coherence by referencing things within and without the text. His top-level terms are ideational, interpersonal, textual, and contextual. Context seems to be added on at the end because for most of the chapter he is talking about three terms. Context refers to the world outside the text that activates the functions of the other three terms. Got that? To further confuse things, there are lots of sub-categories and esoteric terms under each main heading.
However, once you start thinking along these lines and looking at texts, new insights abound. We began by looking at a sign posted at Bagam airport in Mynmar. At the top it says “PEOPLE’S DESIRE.” Under that, it reads:
- Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.
- Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation.
- Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State.
- Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.
Here’s link to a photograph.
The first category under the ideational function in Stillar’s system is “Process Types and Participant Roles.” We had some discussion about whether the bullet points were intended as commands to the people, or statements addressed to the foreign reader to the effect that “The People’s desire is to oppose . . .” The ambiguity is perhaps by design. It seems to work both ways. The roles of the participants are complex but clear. The writer of the sign claims to speak for the people. The foreigner is a potential disruptive element, and is being warned off.
Further analysis can tell us more about how the sign creates its world and constructs it participants. Our own reaction is interesting and complex. We resist the role constructed for us by the discourse.
We went on to discuss and analyze four other texts. One was a statement from a web site about a university writing test. Although the writer is anonymous, the essence of the message is that the Trustees and the faculty make us give this test and dictate its design, so don’t blame us. The other three were letters to shareholders from Enron in 2000, Berkshire Hathaway in 2000, and Lehman Brothers in 2007.
The Enron letter creates the impression that the company and its leaders are omnipotent, omniscient, and raking in tons of money. They have the skills and connections to overwhelm the competition, no matter what market conditions prevail. This is quite ironic because the company went spectacularly bankrupt only a few months later. The Berkshire Hathaway letter, written by Warren Buffett, is folksy and self-deprecating. He says, “I told you last year that we would get our money’s worth for stepped-up advertising at GEICO in 2000, but I was wrong.” He says they are investing in “such cutting edge industries as brick, carpet, insulation, and paint. Try to contain your enthusiasm.” Berkshire Hathaway is, of course, one of the most successful companies in the history of the world.
The Lehman Brothers letter touts the company’s strength and experience, even in difficult market conditions, its four pillars of strength, and its customer service, but finishes up by noting that the share price went down. In a few months, Lehman would be bankrupt too.
I chose these letters for analysis because the circumstances surrounding them make the rhetorical nature of the discourse more obvious. The letter writers strive to construct a world, in some cases largely imaginary, and situate themselves and their readers in their construct. Stillar helps us see how it is done. And this time around, my students didn’t complain. I think they are getting it.
The Reading Conundrum
Filed under: Rhetoric and teaching | Tags: reading pedagogy, reading rhetorically
Comments (6) The book for last week’s seminar meeting was Reading Rhetorically by John Bean, Virginia Chappell, and Alice Gillam. As I noted in another post, this is designed as a freshman text, but I tend to use it as a teacher resource. It is full of reading strategies for students approaching unfamiliar material. Students are taught such things as pre-reading, descriptive outlining, reading with and against the grain, rhetorical questioning, and techniques for integrating and citing quoted and paraphrased material. Fluent academic readers do nearly all of these things by habit and instinct. However, these strategies are rarely taught overtly because freshman composition courses generally focus on writing, not reading. Reading is a skill that is pretty much taken for granted after third grade. If students struggle with reading after third grade, the most common solution is to review phonics and other “learning to read” techniques.
Something is not working because university faculty complain a lot about student reading behaviors. When I do Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) workshops these days, I usually start out by asking the participants what sorts of problems students have doing the reading for their courses. Here is a typical list (I posted this previously to the WPA-L discussion listserv):
Students
- Only read material directly connected to grading
- Will not read before class
- Skip difficult material
- If they don’t see the relevance, they won’t read it
- Form an incorrect hypothesis of the meaning and misread
- Decoding problems
- Unknown vocabulary
- Expect to read only once
- Take everything at face value
- Highlight everything
- Can’t understand written directions
- Are egocentric, can’t see another point of view
- Are unable to reserve judgment until an argument has been completed
- Lack reading practice
- Have a limited range of ability, can read textbooks, but not other books
- Have no background schema to take in learning
- Can’t understand irony or understatement
- Believe everything they read
The “Will not read before class” complaint comes up every time. I finally realized that students were telling us something with that behavior. They do not like to read difficult material cold. They don’t know what to attend to until after the discussion. In my own classes I now give them reading questions and instructions, including things like, “What are the author’s three main points about x?” and “Pay special attention to the paragraph at the bottom of page 47.” Given some guidance, my students usually read the material before class.
If students habitually practiced the strategies presented in Reading Rhetorically, most of these problems would be solved. Most students have not had such training, however, so it is up to the instructor to provide guidance, most often in the form of guide questions and pre-reading activities. In my experience, such measures significantly improve the quality of the discussion and student performance on quizzes and papers. Instructor evaluations also improve.
However, the observation in the list above that students “can read textbooks, but not other books” is telling. Textbook publishers are knowledgeable about reading theory and pedagogy. Textbooks have illustrations, graphs and charts, sidebar guide questions, subheads, summaries, and even CD roms with animations and simulations. A whole arsenal of reading pedagogies is deployed for every style of learning. Have students become dependent on this reader-friendly, learner-friendly style of presentation? And when instructors create similar scaffolding and support for an ordinary book, are we improving learning while also fostering that dependency?
This is the often unasked question at the heart of all “learning-centered” pedagogies. When does the enabling of the learner become too much? When does nurturing the student in a learning-centered environment end up disabling the student for learning in the real world?
I am not asking these questions with curmudgeonly intent. I am not asking “What’s wrong with our students?” The students are great. I am also not trying to dodge the work involved in creating guide questions and thinking about why we are reading this and what students should take away from it. I am asking how we can best serve them in the long run. I think we have to be careful to design our reading assistance with an eye toward strategies that can be internalized over time, so that the student can begin to approach unfamiliar material with his or her own questions and purposes. Reading Rhetorically does that well. Like that book, we need to teach strategies, not do the work for the students. It’s harder than it sounds.
