Learning Needs Survey Analysis (5-10 min)

Some themes on learning in general:

• By far, most frequent is things around “clarity”: Want clear instructions, taking time to go over assignments, consistent deadlines, recap lesson at end, etc.
• Prefer talking in groups
• Direct feedback / one-on-one time with teacher
• Concrete examples to go over
• Be engaging, not long lectures, teacher does not talk whole time
• Break down assignments in chunks
• Time management, attention, organization
• Don’t like being called on randomly, having warm/open environment in class
• Don’t rush through things, slow down if needed

One stray thing that I TOTALLY agree with: don’t have multiple websites/places to go. We are gonna kinda do that. Google Classroom is great but CUNY doesn’t have contract with them and there would be legal issues with things like grades if we tried to use it anyway. We will have to make due with jumping around a bit, but I am going to do my best to make things as clear as they can be (e.g., weekly announcements).

Some themes on remote learning:

• Top one was something related to “clear communication” with/from teacher
• Lack of connection with other students is hard
• Importance of enthusiasm of teacher
• Clarity for assignments, class, etc.
• Tough to learn from home / remote learning just tough in general
• prefer lecture
• Having materials teacher uses available to students (e.g., notes)

Resources:

• If you run into any trouble with anything, I might be able to help by pointing you to some resources, don’t hesitate to ask if you are struggling! See Community Resources on our website. Dean of Students page, especially, has lots of great stuff for all sorts of things. Things like Counseling Center, Health Center, etc. also great.

Let me know if I missed anything and absolutely do not hesitate to point out things that can improve your learning experience as we go through the rest of the course. I have taken these surveys to heart and will do my best to try to accommodate these requests (really only conflict was that some people said they preferred activities/group work and some preferred lectures, but I think there is a nice mix in how I teach anyway on this).

 

Our Mother Tongues and Writing (20 min)

Is writing painful? What makes it painful to you? Why? Is it always painful? (e.g., in school vs. writing to friends vs. writing for work). Take a moment to write down what you think about that on a separate piece of paper or on your device in a word processing document.

Baldwin opens his essay on Black English to say that:

Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other–and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [them].

 

Baldwin, I think, is trying to contextualize the nature of language as concerned with people. As much as some people want it to be true that words can just exist out in the world to share ideas, these words are spoken and written by real, living, breathing people with histories and ancestors and political stakes and so on. Any language or dialect represents a person or people in many ways. Baldwin is locating this truth in perhaps the starkest example of this truth in English language: the contrast between Black English (or, more specifically, African American Vernacular English–AAVE) and White Mainstream English.

Linguist Geneva Smitherman writes that Black English demonstrates a “linguistic push-pull” because it is:

the push toward Americanization of black English counterbalanced by the pull of its Africanization….Both linguistic forms have been necessary for black survival in white America–standard English in attempts to gain access to the social and economic mainstream, black English for community solidarity, deception, and “puttin on ole massa”. (63)

This is an emotional divide. To give up one’s language to take on a different one and to retain another language to remain in a community. This is a question many of you will have to wrestle with as you are educated in college. But, again, in terms of Black English, or AAVE (to get more specific about the U.S. context here), the violence at the center of this “push-pull” really highlights the emotional intensity that is possible at the center of language, as Baldwin puts here (and the passage Smitherman also cites to further explore this “push-pull”):

There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a
speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today.

In the most extreme forms, language can be a matter of survival, as we see in this illustration by Baldwin in reference to the historical legacy of slavery and the evolution of AAVE. But in all forms, language is also who we are. As Smitherman writes elsewhere:

After all, the student’s mother tongue is the language of his/her mother. Dissin a student’s mother tongue can thus be perceived as talkin bout they momma. (8)

White Mainstream English is hard to pin down, but it is something we all feel we are supposed to speak and write with in “professional” or “educational” settings–but that does not mean other languages or dialects that are our “mother tongues” are inferior or not “grammatical” (this is especially messed up because AAVE, New York Latino English, Cajun Vernacular English, Philadelphia English, or other versions of English all have unique grammars that are completely logically sound).

If you think writing is painful, one reason might be is that we were all forced to adapt the languages we loved and grew up around into something else entirely. We were all asked to be someone else. We were asked to give up something about us, and this often happened in writing.

This is something I’m working through and I want your help:

I wonder if the enemy we might have in revision is something else entirely than our own competence as a a good reader of our own writing. An enemy also might be the constraints we face when trying to accommodate an imaginary reader that demands we give up part of ourselves.

How do you keep YOU in language and in writing? How do you keep your history? I hope you ask that question throughout this class and for the rest of your college career (and beyond). Your languages are beautiful, don’t get rid of them.

In this class, we only ask that you become more aware of what you are capable of doing as a writer, to be thoughtful in reflection and revision about how you can do other things (possibly better things), and how you might manage the pain of writing as a pain of labor rather than as a pain levied against your identity and who you are and want to be.

It is up to you, always, for how you use language. But get to know what language is, like Baldwin is trying to explore in his short piece.

 

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Wild Tongue Taming (30 min)

Take a minute to pick a question below that you would like to respond to a bit in writing:

1. What is a wild tongue? Anzaldúa says they can only be cut out, not tamed. Why do you think they say that?
2. For non-Spanish speakers/readers: What was it like to read the Chicano Spanish that Anzaldúa uses? Why do you think Anzaldúa uses Chicano Spanish in her essay?
3. How many languages do you think you have? How do you know? How can you use them as a writer? Or should you never write certain languages? Why or why not?
4. Why do languages change? How come Spanish became Chicano Spanish in a certain region of the southwest US and Mexico? How come there is a thing called AAVE? Or, really, anything? How come there is not just an “English”?
5. One of the section titles of Anzaldúa’s essay is “Linguistic Terrorism.” What do you think that means in the context of this essay?

Okay, let’s see the breakdown. Raise your hand–either on video or through Zoom functions–each time I ask you who wants to work on what question.

Okay, once we have a roughly even number per question, take 3-5 minutes to write some brainstorm-y type thoughts about your question. Then, I’ll assign you to breakout rooms to talk about it.

 

Literacy Narrative Assignment (5 min)

We are going to explore these kinds of themes in our Literacy Narrative project: what our languages are and how the practice writing, schooling, and other factors in our development into adults have continued to shape how we have adapted those languages to reading and writing over time.

To get the prompt for the first major writing project, go to Blackboard>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts>Major Writing Projects.

Let’s go over this briefly, just so it is on your mind in the early going. The first draft is due September 15. We will return to it in the coming days.

 

Question for Second Reading Response Due 9/8 (5 min)

Our QSR for Tuesday is going to help you think through some possible directions for examples you might write about in your Literacy Narrative. Let’s go over the prompt together.

Go to Blackboard>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts>Questions for Second Reading Response to get the prompt.

 

Writing Process and Practice (10-15 min)

Thinking about rules of writing from last class brings us to consider how writing gets done. Not really as adhering finely to a set list of rules, but to a full rhetorical situation. That is: what is your purpose? Who is your audience? What constraints do you face to do this writing?

Once you have a sense of the rhetorical situation, it is time to figure out the full context of how you’ll do your writing:

1. the process we use for going from ideas to words on page (and back again to ideas and back to words and so on).
2. the practice you will develop to get you into a space to do some writing, reading, revising, etc. (e.g., the time you will write, the place you will write, the sounds you want to hear, the ways you’ll nourish your body)

Writing Process

If there is one thing we know pretty confidently in my field of rhetoric and composition, it is that to improve your writing you have to consider all aspects of the writing process and not just when the final words hit the page.

There’s no one way to do it, but here are some general stages that typically are useful to think through that I want to share. But before I do, what stages of writing would you name and how would you define them?

Take 1-2 minutes to map out the full process of how you write from the moment you are thinking through ideas all the way to the point of sharing a final version with some readers.

Here’s my non-official list of writing process stages.

Take this term to experiment with different ways to have a writing process! Change and adapt when things aren’t working.

 

Reading and Writing Practice

A writing practice is carefully considering what environmental conditions help you read and write best and to try to set those conditions as much as possible when reading and writing.

Some examples are:

• What time of day do you write best?
• Do you like noise or silence?
• Do you prefer a desk or somewhere more informal?
• How do you manage distractions?
• If you like music to help, what kind of music works best for you?

The Learning Module on Tuesday will dig into this a bit more, but start to think about this now, especially as you work on your QSR for Thursday and your first draft of your Literacy Narrative.

Reading and Writing Goals

Another thing you will start to explore more during the Learning Module on Tuesday will be setting goals for your writing. I want to take a moment to tell you this can take many shapes. It can be the content of your writing, but it can also be things related to process and practice! For instance:

• Sticking to my writing schedule each week
• Writing for at least 5 hours per week
• Writing 300 words per working day
• Rewriting at least two sections of 200 words or more during revision
• Sharing my work with others before first draft is done fore each assignment
• Finishing my reading assignments two days in advance to have more time to write

 

Learning Module Logistics (5-10 min)

So, starting on this Tuesday, we are going to do our weekly asynchronous Learning Modules. These will be lecture notes, activities, small writing assignments, and other stuff that all center on lesson objectives I want you to explore.

Usually, they will be “posts” where you will be asked to comment at the end of the post (or somewhere else–e.g., another student’s QSR response post) before moving on. It will look pretty similar to the Blogging@Baruch module we did last class.

Each week, I will post the Learning Module by Friday morning, and I will expect you to complete the module by 5pm on Tuesdays. I will acknowledge your completion of the Learning Modules by your completions of all tasks asked of you (e.g., writing in comments when prompted, submitting work to Blackboard or on blog when prompted) to get full credit.

Since we will do this for the first time on 9/8, I figured I could ALSO be available during our normal 2:55pm-4:35pm course time. So, I have a Zoom meeting set up that you can jump on from 2:55pm-4:35pm in case you have any questions about the module. I just ask that you announce when you are in there because I might not notice!

Next Time (2-5 min)

-Submit QSR #2 on Tuesday by 3pm

-Read Straub and complete Reading Annotation on Tuesday by 3pm

-Complete Learning Module on Tuesday by 5pm