Random Thoughts

Writing is really important to me.  I recently discovered that the fact that I wasn’t writing regularly, and that I wasn’t really writing at all outside of this blog, was part of what was wrong with my life all spring.  I don’t know why I am so slow…

Anyway, I came across a site Go Write Now! that, if it continues, will be one that I want to visit regularly.  There are some writing prompts and some more general posts about writing.  Check it out!

Scott McLeod over at Dangerously Irrelevant has a post that illustrates what I have been trying to say about examining sources and thinking critically about what we read.  He took a news release about research on Facebook users and analyzed it.  The news release, in proper journalistic style, cited the authors of the study it reported on but did not cite any sources used in their research.  Scott took the numbers in the press release though, and discovered that there wasn’t a lot of substance to it.  He said,

In my mind, the overall generalizations from the study don’t seem to adequately recognize the extremely heavy skew in the non-Facebook group toward graduate students. If I saw that the data (to which she alluded) show that the lower grade trend for grad students was of equivalent size to the undergrad group, then I’d have more confidence in the overall generalizations that are being made in the news release.

Again, this research was presented as fact and we have no real way, short of stumbling upon a copy of their study, to verify anything that the release says.  Scott makes very clear  his opinion on the need to evaluate research like this:

One final note: We all should look at – and think carefully about – any research findings that get reported out like this. We need to ask questions like Does this make gut-level sense? and Are the generalizations limited to the data or overbroad? and What more do I need to know to be confident in these findings?. Being informed consumers of research is critical if we are to make research- and/or data-driven decisions to benefit our students.

When academic research is  reported on, as Scott says, we need to think about what else we need to know.  It would be nice if we could be given some access to this additional  information in the report.  I understand that this may not be possible due to copyright or publication agreements.  But it would be nice.

Well, I turned my strategic vision in to the dean yesterday, and she was going to pass it on to the Vice President today. So that is one big thing off my to-do list! Hooray!

I’ve sent one article I wrote off for publication, and it is going to be published. I have to get another couple articles written and sent off before January. One is pretty well written already — just needs to be pared down and tightened up a bit. So I should be in pretty good shape come time to turn in my Faculty Evaluation portfolio in early January. At least I hope so!

I have been struggling this week with how to help my student writers.  Some of them really get it.  They can write a very good paper.  It will be organized well and have only a few grammar problems.  Others of them though, have trouble with organization as well as grammar.  I have noticed that a big part of the  problem is really that these students do not use clear and precise vocabulary.

I have taught ESL writing for a lot of years now, and I never remember students having as much trouble as this group does.  I spent all class yesterday working with a small group of them to get them to write topic sentences that expressed a clear idea.  And what I got from them today was better, but there were still problems — like the young lady who wrote about the “goodness” of social networking for education, saying things like

It is goodness for students study.

Now that I see it written here, it doesn’t look as bad to me as it did before.  But it isn’t anything that I would ever say.

And then there is the young man who wrote:

Now technology is running so fast and it brings podcasts to people.

My purpose here is not to criticize or ridicule my students but to try to get some perspective — and maybe some advice — on their writing and on what I can do to help them.

The students are all, except for one, Chinese.  I know that colors their writing.  But somehow I have to help them learn to write, not as Americans, but as Chinese who understand Americans and what we expect when we read.  The young lady I quoted above will probably be in some ESL classes again next semester, so there is time to hep her.  But the young man is determined to get out of ESL at the end of this semester.  I would like to see him be able to do that, but we have to work on his writing before that can happen.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.  Their writing has really improved.  But there is still a ways to go.  I wish I had a magic potion to give them or a fairy godmother to grant their wish.  Since I have neither, I will have to keep trying to work with them individually as much as I can and see what we can do.

I know this is even more frustrating for them than it is for me.  For me it is an intellectual challenge, but it is their lives and their futures.  I only wish there were an easy answer.

As I have tried to write more here, I have discovered that  sometimes have nothing to say.  Yesterday, for instance, I started a post just to post something.  It wasn’t worth the paper it wouldn’t have been written on, so I deleted it. I have wondered how bloggers can come up with so much interesting stuff to write about all the time.  And I have wondered why I sometimes hit such dry spells.

I have taken solace lately in the Orwell Diaries, which I have written about before.  For the last two days, the entries have been the same two words:

One egg.

Granted, these posts were not written for public consumption, but I find them interesting.  This great writer, who in other entries in is diaries has described different aspects of life in great detail, had nothing to write about on these two days but

One egg.

So maybe it is OK to have dry spells.

Well, I have completed my first final draft of the Strategic Vision.  It is 12 pages long.  Not that it says all that much, but…

It is out for a couple people to look at now before I make final revisions and edits and then send it on its way.

Next up:  A paper entitled “15 things to do with a piece of paper”.  At least I hope I can come up with 15 things!  If not, it may be “10 things…” or even possibly “5 things…”  Oh well… We’ll have to see how it turns out.

It seems everyone is doing it this year: writing a novel in a month.  I can’t do that.  There isn’t time enough to do “extra” writing when I have a strategic vision for the ESL program I direct and several articles to get written and/or finished and sent off for publication.  And, in case you hadn’t noticed, I am really trying to get back to writing here regularly.  So I don’t think a novel fits into the schedule this year. But I do want to take inspiration from all the budding novelists out there and commit to the following:

• finishing my strategic vision (Finishing it is not an option, but I might as well put it on the list!)
• getting two more articles written and sent off for publication
• blogging every day this month.

That last one will probably be the hardest because I am going to a conference, where I may or may not have internet access, and to visit my daughter in California for a week, where I may have other things to do.  But that is the plan.  Let’s see how I do!

I have received a couple comments lately that I want to respond to.  The first was from Patrick Higgins on my post about teaching writing.  He asked if I grade blog posts.  When I have had students blog, I have counted numbers of posts or whether or not they posted the log on the day it was their responsibility to do so.  I haven’t really ever graded the quality of their posts.  I suppose part of the reason was that I didn’t want to make blogging just another graded activity.  And I was hoping that they would try to do a good job of writing when they posted to the blog.  That wasn’t always the case, but I am OK with that.  For me, student blogging is about increasing the amount of writing they do and the frequency with which they write.  It is stressful enough for my students to write and more stressful for them to write in public; I wouldn’t want to add to it by making them worry about the grade it will receive.  I am not sure if my reasoning has been good or not, but that is how I have done it.  And I think it is how I will do it next time, too.

And on a totally different note, Angie asked about the symbols I used to illustrate the pronunciation of andragogy.  That was IPA pronunciation courtesy of dictionary.com.  They offer both a spelled pronunciation and IPA pronunciation.  I had to learn IPA when I was in grad school and, at the time, felt it was more trouble than it was worth.  Since then, of course, it has been quite valuable.  For more on IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) you can check out this entry on Wikipedia.

When my reading in Bloglines doesn’t spark any ideas for a post, I have taken to clicking on the “writing” tag on the WordPress site.  Today, after a couple false starts, I came across a post by someone I was totally unfamiliar with, Patrick Higgins, at Chalkdust101.  In this post Higgins links to an article by Bradley Hammer about writing and thinking and thinking about writing.

Talking about high school students entering college, he says:

Often they’re shocked to discover that effective academic writing is more complex than adherence to grammatical rules.

and

…“standards-driven” high school writing is hindering student interest. Without real opportunities for students to publish their writing, they will assess that they write not for meaning, intellectual discovery, communication or understanding, but rather in obligatory, outdated, punitive and procedural ways to obtain grades. Consequently, as students spend their years of education consumed with standardized tests, they learn to write — and think — in ways that fail to offer rich and critical contexts for learning.

and

Writing courses that remain wedded to the genre and methods of the past merely limit students’ ability to imagine their work as real. The traditional argumentative essay does not force students to engage critically with complex reasoning “about” an issue, but rather merely instructs them on how to argue “for” or “against” it.

The article was filled with a lot that I need to go back and read again.  I know it got me thinking about how I am teaching writing.  And it feeds into my concern about how I would use blogs with my students.  No, actually, that isn’t true.  It helps me see possibilities for using blogs that I hadn’t really seen before.

And back to Higgins’ post, he invited Hammer to talk to the English department where he is about writing.  He reports on Hammer’s comments:

Most of his work, he stated, is deconstructing what the students come in with.  For example, he stated that 15 years ago, it was common for students to arrive at the college campus with very poor argumentative skills: weak ability to write strong theses, very little support for arguments in their writing.  Now, they all arrive knowing how to “do the essay.”  Formulaic, straightforward positions, support at all the appropriate turns, and of course, an adherence to the five-paragraph format.  His work is to get them away from “doing the essay,” to caring about the essay.

His work is about teaching students to deconstruct their own biases in their writing so that when confronted with a traditional topic (he used abortion in our our conversation as an example) the students would begin to generate questions about the factors that define the topic rather than automatically deciding which side of the argument to sit on.  For the students in his writing class, it’s not about whether or not you can convince someone of something, but rather that you get an understanding of yourself through an issue presented to you.

As someone who cares about writing and teaches writing, there is a lot for me to think about there. I will write about it more after I have had more time to think about my own situation in light of those words.

I’ve added Chalkdust101 to my Bloglines account, so you can expect to read more from Higgins here in the future.

While looking aroung WordPress this morning, I came across a link on The Whole Garden will Bow to a 1999 piece by Kurt Vonnegut about writing.  I had seen this before, but I had forgotten about it.  It is very clear advice that I think I want to share with my students.  Some of them, at least, would appreciate it.

Many of my students aspire to write really well in English.  They are journalism or broadcast journalism majors; they need to be able to write.  It has been very gratifying to see some of them really “get” writing in English.  It hasn’t been easy, but they have done it.  I can’t wait to see what they are producing by December!